It's always disappointing when a long-admired director misfires. Unfortunately, this is becoming something of a regular occurrence for both Woody Allen and Ken Loach. Since starting out in the 1960s, each has developed a recognisable style that has served him well in respectively satirising the foibles of the cultivated middle-classes and exposing the iniquities of contemporary society. But, while Allen and Loach remain fine film-makers, their pictures have become increasingly inconsistent since the mid-1990s and neither You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger nor Route Irish will rank among their more memorable achievements.

Having revisited New York for Whatever Works, Allen returns to London for his latest stab at an Ingmar Bergman-style chamber drama. Despite the whimsical mood set by the playing of `When You Wish Upon a Star' over the opening credits and the jocular tone of narrator Zak Orth, this is more a sardonic treatise on the futility and fragility of life than a comic fantasy. Indeed, with nobody being contented with their lot, its cogitations on marital angst, professional ennui and personal regret seem sourer than usual and this lack of compassion towards the characters is compounded by Allen's disconcerting detachment from proceedings.

Sixtysomething Gemma Jones has been living on her nerves since husband Anthony Hopkins demanded a divorce in order to enjoy what remains of his life. However, she finds solace in psychic Pauline Collins, who not only convinces Jones that love is just around the corner, but also that American son-in-law Josh Brolin's new novel will be a flop. Much to his annoyance, she proves to be right, as publisher Alex MacQueen rejects the manuscript and he resorts to stealing the text that poker pal Ewen Bremner was working on when he was killed in a car crash.

In the midst of this crisis, Brolin also becomes infatuated with Freida Pinto, an Indian musician who lives in the flat opposite. They begin lunching in secret and he becomes more distant than ever from wife Naomi Watts, who has developed her own crush on gallery-owning boss, Antonio Banderas. However, after an idyllic night at the opera, her romantic dreams are shattered when she learns that he is having a fling with her artist friend, Anna Friel, and she decides to quit and start up a rival business.

She asks Jones for money to launch the venture. But Collins has advised her against all financial transactions and Jones now trusts her every word implicitly, as she has fallen for widowed occult bookseller Roger Ashton-Griffiths, who is awaiting séance permission from his late wife to re-wed. Hopkins has shown no such caution, however, and has blundered into a union with Lucy Punch, an actress-cum-escort who accepts his proposal after being showered with expensive gifts. Watts is appalled by her father's folly and he soon learns that he has been cuckolded. However, Punch is pregnant and Hopkins is torn between divorce and having a longed-for son.

Allen leaves this decision in the air, along with Brolin's appalling discovery that buddy Philip Glenister got his facts wrong and that Bremner is only in a coma. But, rather than dwell on Brolin's realisation that his sole chance of preserving his reputation lies in murder, Allen closes on an image of Jones and Ashton-Griffiths sitting contentedly on a park bench to prove that while the fates frequently conspire against us, they can also sometimes raise a benevolent smile.

Allen has never been one for naturalistic dialogue, but too many utterances ring hollow in this convoluted melodrama. The Cockney argot coined for Punch and Collins falls widest of the mark, but Hopkins and Brolin similarly struggle with the casual references to the likes of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, while neither Watts nor Banderas sounds much like an art expert. Part of the problem lies in the fact that Allen has packed this roundelay with so many roles that he scarcely has time to develop any of them in detail. Brolin's poker buddies and Pinto's family are particularly poorly drawn, while Collins, Friel, Ashton-Griffiths and even Banderas seem more like plot devices than fully fledged characters.

There are moments of wit and poignancy, while Vilmos Zsigmond's cinematography is typically accomplished. But a discomfiting air of superiority ensures that there are also too many cheap laughs, notably at the expense of Punch's lack of sophistication and Jones's gullibility (after Collins convinces her that she has had several past lives). There is also something peevish about Brolin's relationship with the broody Watts and something sinister about Pinto's easy seduction by a voyeur who has been turned on by the sight of her canoodling with her fiancé. Thus, this winds up fulfilling Orth's opening promise from Macbeth that it is a `tale of sound and fury signifying nothing'.

Marking his 12th collaboration with Ken Loach, Paul Laverty's screenplay for Route Irish is similarly hidebound by bluster and expository verbiage. Striving both to expose the crimes being committed in our name in war zones like Iraq and Afghanistan and consider the toll taken on those who serve there in a military or private security capacity, this has more in common with the 1990 thriller Hidden Agenda than any of Loach's customary social realist outings. But, for all its laudable aspirations, this didactic drama lacks the political and psychological nuance to convince and occasionally comes perilously close to being as thuddingly boorish as a Steven Seagal or Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

Scouse SAS veteran Mark Womack is distraught when childhood pal John Bishop is killed by an IED on the eponymous road between Baghdad airport and the Green Zone and makes a scene at the funeral by lambasting security bosses Jack Fortune and Geoff Bell. However, Bishop's widow, Andrea Lowe, is equally angry and refuses to accept Womack's condolences, as she blames him for Bishop going to Iraq in the first place.

As he leaves the church, Womack is handed a mobile by Spanish friend Najwa Nimri and he becomes suspicious when Fortune and Bell make such a fuss about having it returned. On the phone, Womack discovers footage of an Iraqi family and some innocent bystanders being murdered by a team led by Bishop's superior, Trevor Williams, and he asks former comrade Russell Anderson to investigate the incident. Womack also contacts Talib Rasool, an Iraqi living in Liverpool, and asks him to translate what is being said in the film and, having bugged Bell's car, he becomes convinced that Bishop was murdered to prevent him from reporting the crime.

As Womack and Lowe embark upon a sado-masochistic affair, he discovers that Williams is coming home on leave and he abducts him shortly after the beefy thug hospitalises Rasool for compromising the cover-up. Womack waterboards Williams to extract a confession and summarily executes him. However, he learns soon afterwards that Williams had been out of Baghdad when Bishop was killed and takes terrible revenge on Fortune and Bell before committing suicide off the Mersey ferry.

Loach can never be accused of lacking commitment to a cause. However, he can occasionally get too close to an issue to view it with sufficient objectivity and this bid to locate ethical certainties in the muddiest of waters is a case in point. The decision to have a less-than heroic protagonist is courageous and Womack responds commendably by seething with a fury that is born as much out of regret than righteousness. But his one-man mission to punish those responsible for killing his mate quickly enters the realms of B-movie vigilantism, while his climactic noble gesture smacks more of mawkish melodrama than gritty realism.

Comedian John Bishop acquits himself admirably in his first dramatic role. But some of the supporting performances are decidedly awkward, as is the usually reliable George Fenton's score. Similarly, while cinematographer Chris Menges works hard to give the imagery an authentic feel, the over-reliance on Skype chats with Anderson and barmaid Donna Elso draws attention to the action's lack of scope, while the centrality of recorded evidence to the storyline feels somewhat secondhand after Redacted and In the Valley of Elah.

Loach and Laverty make salient points about governmental war-mongering, corporate opportunism, ex-soldiers being forced to turn mercenary in order to survive recessional times and the stress placed upon those waiting for them back home. But the plotting is often cumbersome, with Womack's penitent realisation that he has become as callous as his quarry typifying its contrivances. Thus, while Loach again proves himself to be a passionate and provocative commentator on the contemporary scene, he also demonstrates conclusively that the thriller is not his métier.

Jobbing actor Nick Nevern has much to learn where directing is concerned, but the London he presents in Terry is much more credible than Loach's Liverpool. Moreover, his expletive-riddled dialogue also has a more authentic ring than Laverty's. Yet this Man Bites Dog-style documentary (which is already available on DVD) says little about capital lowlife that hasn't already been said before by Eran Creevy, Gerard Johnson and Sam Holland in equally low-budget offerings like Shifty, Tony and Zebra Crossing.

The handheld action opens in June 2009 with Nevern and best friend Ian Duck being recorded burgling Kim Butson's flat by Manuel Atkinson, who is profiling Nevern for a film school project. Despite his lairy charm, Nevern is not the most exciting subject, as he seems to spend most of his time arguing with cousin Sofie Evans's doltish boyfriend Gary Butler or hanging out with Duck and Daniel Burten-Shaw, a hoodie dealer working for black brothers Jason Baptiste and Nari Blair-Mangat. Nevertheless, he talks a good game and, while shooting pool in the pub, he warns Atkinson of the shocking things he is likely to witness on his manor.

In addition to owing Burten-Shaw money, the short-fused Duck also has an unhealthy relationship with his sister, Anita Bravin and he crashes her party during another night of reckless hedonism. On their way home, Duck picks up Butson in a café and Atkinson captures them having a threesome with Nevern before they all scarper next morning. Indeed, Atkinson is becoming so tight with the twosome that he lets Nevern film him them kicking lumps out of the thief who tried to steal his camera.

However, everything begins to unravel after an accidental shooting during a rooftop barbecue and Nevern decides to go straight after Burten-Shaw murders Duck. But, no sooner has Atkinson completed his film than he turns it over to the Metropolitan Police and a series of captions reveal the resulting sentences.

Viscerally photographed by Atkinson, pugnaciously edited by Steven O'Connell and played with rascally panache by Nevern and Duck, this is a capable variation on several well-worn themes. Costing a mere £500 to make, it's by no means a British Mean Streets. But neither is it just another Mockney pastiche. There are longueurs, such as the dull encounter with Matthew Leonard Levesconte (who tries to flog Nevern a fan heater), and there's an excess of peripheral characters like David Munns's chatty Mancunian and incidental partygoers like Cheyenne Raymond and Maximillian Aire. But Nevern impresses as the small-timer with delusions of gangsta grandeur (and suppressed homoerotic feelings for Duck) and the pride he takes in landing a job as a hotel porter makes Atkinson's act of betrayal all the more striking.

Curiously, this inner-city grimness finds echo in the waterlogged expanses of the Mississippi Delta in Lance Hammer's impressive feature debut, Ballast, which was shot with a real outsider's eye for telling detail by North East-based cinematographer Lol Crawley. Indeed, with Hammer's editing being as sharp and eclectic as Crawley's camerawork is restless and evocative, this is a remarkable effort by the Californian, who was best known for his SFX work on Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997) and Practical Magic (1998) before serving as assistant art director on Joel and Ethan Coen's The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) and completing the short, Issaquena (2002).

The moody, measured action opens with decent neighbour Johnny McPhail discovering African-American shopkeeper Micheal J. Smith sitting alone in a state of shock because his twin brother has overdosed on pills. Having survived his own clumsy attempt at committing suicide with his father's gun, Smith returns to his isolated homestead and is almost immediately robbed at gunpoint by his 12 year-old nephew, JimMyron Ross, who needs quick cash to pay off a drug debt to bully dealer Ventress Bonner. But it's only when Ross and his cleaner mother Tarra Riggs are forced off the highway by Bonner's goons that she realises the extent of her son's delinquency and she insists on moving into the spare lodgings on Smith's land so she can sort their lives out.

Overcoming her dislike of Smith, whom she blames for the break-up of her relationship with his sibling, Riggs re-opens the roadside convenience store and masters the ordering rubric, while arranging to home school the recalcitrant Ross, who prefers to spend his time walking Smith's vulpine dog. However, old prejudices still run deep and it takes a couple of acts of emotional courage before Riggs and Smith can settle their differences and begin again.

Owing as much to the Dardenne brothers as Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977), this is grindingly rigorous and austerely authentic drama is superbly enacted by the non-professional cast, who spent two months workshopping the scenario after Hammer decided to jettison his screenplay. No one says very much, but the trio's pain and frustration is evident in Kent Sparling's inspired sound design, which saps the spirit with each squelching footstep across the muddy terrain and car journey through the characterless backwater landscape. Simultaneously beautiful and bleak, warm and sombre, this is what slice-of-life cinema should look and feel like and it deserves to be widely seen.

The same is true of Benda Belili!

While making Victoire Terminus in Kinshasa in 2004, French documentarists Renaud Barret and Florent de la Tullaye came across the busking band Staff Benda Bilili, which loosely translates as `Look Beyond Appearances'. Struck by the unique blend of samba and rhythm`n'blues and the indomitability of leader Léon `Ricky' Likabu (who was confined to a wheelchair by polio and slept rough in a cardboard box), the pair offered to finance a record and returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo the following year.

While Papa Ricky and guitarist Coco Ngambali Yakala were preparing for the chance of a lifetime, Barret and De la Tullaye introduced them to 12 year-old Roger Landu, a street kid who could play the most haunting melodies on an instrument called a satonge that he had fashioned from an empty tin, a curved piece of wood and a taut string. The veterans graciously welcomed the cocky kid to their rehearsals at Kinshasa Zoo and everything seemed set. But the session was abandoned following a fire at the shanty hostel where many of the bandmates lived with their families and four years were to pass before the film-makers were able to return.

They were pleased to find that the combo was still playing and, having ventured outside the city to locate Roger, they informed the amazed musicians that they had arranged for them to go on a European tour. The reaction of the impoverished Congolese to luxury hotels, Norwegian snow and packed venues tilts the film away from the struggle to survive in a corrupt and often dangerous country towards a euphoric climax, as Benda Bilili steal the show at the Eurockeennes concert in Belfort. But it's impossible not to be swept away by the excited energy of the band's performances and the enthusiastic response of crowds who could only have the vaguest notion of the group's origins.

Considering the emphasis that is placed on Papa Ricky's gritty lyrics being based on his own experiences, it's somewhat disappointing that so few of the songs are subtitled. However, this remains a compelling profile of dauntless survivors, who refuse to be defined by either their disability or their poverty. Barret and De la Tullaye include discussions of street urchins combing (or stealing) in order to get by and depict the band busking outside restaurants in the hope of picking up tips from tourists and well-heeled Congolese. But socio-political comment becomes increasingly confined to the margins once the rags-to-riches story kicks in.