If vacuity had any weight, you could kill an ox by dropping on it Michelangelo Antonioni's latest film, The Passenger. Emptiness is everywhere: in landscapes and townscapes, churches and hotel rooms, and most of all in the script. Never was dialogue more portentously vacuous, plot more rudimentary yet preposterous, action more haphazard and spasmodic, characterization more tenuous and uninvolving, film making more devoid of all but postures and pretensions. In his great films (L'Avventura, The Eclipse), Antonioni managed to show real people gnawed on by aimlessness, boredom, self-hate, against backgrounds of gorgeous isolation or bustling indifference. They were people whose words and gestures we recognized, whose obsessions or despair we could understand, especially as they were surrounded by vistas or artifacts that objectified their malaise.

In The Passenger, however, everything must be taken on the say-so of the film makers, on the slender evidence of a pained expression...