Neil Gaiman understood the country where he’d landed as an immigrant in the Nineties by writing American Gods.

Julie Dash’s remarkable 1991 film tells the story of the Peazant family, the descendants of freed slaves who live on the Georgia Sea Islands, an isolated community on the South-Eastern seaboard of the USA, more in touch with African traditions than other black Americans.

The three generations depicted in the film are at a crossroads: the younger Peazants are about to move to the North, leaving the elders behind in the South. Th film's dialogue is in Gullah, a vivid and poetic patois reminiscent of street Jamaican. Dash and her cinematographer, her then husband Arthur Jafa, have achieved a dreamlike visual style of great aesthetic beauty. The pace and editing of the film, which slides gently through different layers of narrative, including the voice-over of an unborn child, creates an elegiac mood, as well as evoking something of the less time-bound perspective of the traditional African mind. In this world, the souls of the ancestors are present, provide guidance and ground for the living.

This was the first widely released American film to have been directed by an African-American woman. Although she is renowned for her activism, Dash is never cliché-bound. The women in the film come across more strongly than the men: from the elder Nana (Cora Lee Day), rich in the wisdom of herbs and potions, and steeped in the spirit-based beliefs of Africa, through the passion and innocence of Eula (Alva Rogers), and on to the world-weariness of Yellow Mary (Barbara O Jones). The entire cast is totally convincing and bring to this almost magical realist tale a feeling of immediacy and veracity.

In the making of her most recent album Lemonade, Beyoncé spoke of being influenced by the film’s emphasis on the importance of African cultural roots – a tradition-focused slant much more sophisticated than the "back to Africa", Afro-hairstyle fashion of the late 1960s. The film addresses, obliquely but no less powerfully, the legacy of slavery and lynching, in the context of an extended family which wrestles, passionately and intelligently, with their spiritual heritage, a legacy of beliefs, ways of relationship and connection with the past, that provide them with great pride – not just in spite of the wounds they have suffered over centuries, but perhaps also in part thanks to them.

This BFI dual-format release of a newly restored print includes Dash's audio commentary to the film, a 72-minute interview with her from earlier this year, as well as one with cinematographer Jafa, and a Q&A with the director from the 2016 Chicago International Film Festival, moderated by playwright and actress Regina Taylor.

Such extras provide invaluable context to an extraordinary work. Dash’s film speaks of traditions that are as fundamentally American as any other, ties that connect African-Americans with their tragic history at the hands of white traders and slave-owners, as well as with their roots further back in a culture in which every form of life, from food and cooking to music and farming, expresses the life of the spirit. It has always partly been this intense spiritual quality in African-American life that has been most threatening to white culture and forms of Christianity intent on seeing the spirit as in some way superior to the senses and the sensual, and denying so vehemently the vitality of the human body and nature. It's true as well, as Beyoncé no doubt recognises, that much of the deep unease which runs through African-American culture today and that leads to violence and drug use, is in part caused by a general loss of connection to the ancestors that Daughters of the Dust so beautifully portrays.

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@Rivers47

Overleaf: watch the 2016 trailer for the restored Daughters of the Dust

While Merkel's Germany has won back world leadership, Wagner's festival shrine at Bayreuth lost its post-war pre-eminence years ago. There hasn't been a strong Ring there since Kupfer's, which I was lucky enough to see in 1991, and things will only improve with the departure of overweening Katharina Wagner and Christian Thielemann (fine conductor, disastrous people-person).

As Wonder Woman hits screens worldwide, the publication of a book that explores the myth and reality of the Amazon seems timely. The latest of John Man’s works of popular history is opportunistic enough to end with a fascinating account of the origins of the female world-saviour originally launched by DC Comics in 1941.

This last of Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s semi-staged Monteverdi series took us back practically to the very start of the whole genre. L’Orfeo was presented in Mantua in 1607 as a court opera, and will have been seen and heard by a fraction of the number of people who crowded into Bristol’s Colston Hall on Sunday night.

Guy Ritchie is back birthing turkeys. Who can remember/forget that triptych of stiffs Swept Away, Revolver and RocknRolla? Now, having redemptively bashed his CV back into shape with the assistance of Sherlock Holmes, the mockney rebel turns to another of England’s heritage icons in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword.

Do, however, dump that fantasy of yours of a triumphant return to the multiplex for medieval chivalry and courtly romance. Messrs Malory, Tennyson and dear old Lancelyn-Green can start rotating in their tombs now because King Arthur is basically Lock, Stock and One Stonking Sword, in which Ritchie filters national myth through the only aesthetic he knows: the stop-start gor-blimey rock video in which everyone channels their inner Winstone.We begin at max. vol. in Camelot, a bristling castle deep in the digitised heart of soundstageland where Uther Pendragon (Eric Bana) is ousted by his black-hearted sibling Vortigern (Jude Law), but not before sending his infant son off to float in a boat down-river to Londinium, where absolutely no one speaks Latin. Here the boy is adopted by a brothel, studies at the school of knocks and knockers before eventually growing up to assume the guise of Charlie Hunnam.

Who, you may perhaps wonder, the hell is Charlie Hunnam? And where’s Elba, McAvoy or, sod it, Hiddleston when you want a screen hero to beg a selfie with at the prem? “Get me Hunnam” were not the words uttered by whoever was in charge at Warner Bros when the casting merry-go-round started six years ago. But on the first day of production he was the last man still in the vertical and to his credit he certainly looks the part. Whenever he takes off his car coat, that torso is a rubbly cluster of chamfered boulders scarcely contained within a plucked Tinseltown dermis. It’s only when he opens his mouth to declaim the script’s deathless poetry that you think, maybe don’t.

To be fair, that goes for everyone else in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Arfur falls in with a lairy cohort on secondment from the Two Smoking Barrels visitor experience. They're lads called Arthurian things like Goosefat Bill, Wet Stick, Mischief John. You can randomly generate these idiot names. Bob Cobblers, Perry Pliars, Def Geoffrey, Burkina Fatso, Sid Skidmark, Kung Fu Trev, “The Jizza”, Handjob Hannan, Strong and Stable Nige, David Beckham (yes he’s actually in it, pictured: Vinnie Jones can sleep easy).

Meanwhile back at CGIamelot, whither Arfur must journey to draw a sword from a stone and thusly provoke avuncular wrath, Jude Law is holding the fort with just two scowling sidekicks and a thousand-strong army of pixellated stickmen (pictured above). The problem with Jude, whose task is to commit nephewcide so he can assume the powers of Excalibur, is that he’s just not dastardly enough, however much he does that wicked thing with his neck or slumps bolshily in his throne or knifes his loved ones, therein depleting the screen of its last but one speaking female. The only woman who gets to say much at all is called The Mage, which feels like a covert misspelling of Madge to whom Ritchie was once espoused. The Mage (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, pictured below) has lighty-uppy eyes and telekinetic control over various fauna which make sundry plot interventions when the script can’t think how else to get Arfur and co out of yet another slap (and tickle: pickle).

Action comedy is the trickiest of hybrids. Ritchie goes at it with a unfit-for-purpose toolkit of mallets, ping-pong bats and one phallusy broadsword. When the script’s not being clever-clever or funny-funny it’s being stupid-stupid. Enormo-pachyderms, one jumbo basilisk and a three-headed lady octopus all continue cinema’s galloping mania for gigantism (see also Kong: Skull Island and Jurassic World). The plot, meanwhile, is a botched origami.

The industry press is full of theories about the film’s calamitous opening weekend. One factor no one’s mentioned is Brexit. “You are addressing England!” Hunnam intones to a top-knotted delegation of Vikings at the end. Never mind that the best bits are filmed among rocky Celtic outcrops, the rest of the world isn’t that impressed by England these days, and maybe wants no truck with its self-vaunting myths, whether rebooted, mashed up or slapped inside sniggersome inverted commas. Ritchie’s Arthurian ledge has stripped itself of all context. Even the king's famous furniture is subjected to his belittling gift for bathos. “Wossat?” says one of the rainbow nation of newly ennobled knights in a final reveal. “It’s a table,” says Arfur. “You sit at it.” This will be the only sitting.

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@JasperRees

Overleaf: it's approximately this bad