ENTER THE VOID no stars

Quite early on in Gaspar Noe's "Enter the Void" an addict smokes what I presumed to be crack and Noe's camera interprets for us the images that he might be experiencing, a kind of swivelling red gaseous mass, at first frighteningly tactile and then more soothingly diaphanous. Never having taken crack myself I still have no reason to doubt that this is probably what it's like and you think if anyone's going to give us an accurate picture of what taking drugs is like, then it will be Noe.

Unfortunately Noe is a filmmaker whose desire to experiment with all forms of film and whose desire to shock means he is in constant danger of alienating his audience. There are people who worship at his altar and who have hailed "Enter the Void" as his masterpiece but for me the technical brilliance on display doesn't make up for the bad acting and lousy dialogue. Great tracking shots and stunning cinematography are all very well but there is no-one on screen you can relate to and the inane things they say are painful to listen to, (I might have liked it more had it been silent), and in "Enter the Void" we have to listen to them and watch them for close on three hours.

The very flimsy plot has something to do with a Tokyo sex club and bar, The Void, where our drug-smoking protagonist meets his end, again very early in the picture, but who lives on as a kind of ghostly narrator for the rest of the film as he takes us on a long tour of his life and world. The film would be clever if it weren't so banal and the imagery is more likely to induce a migraine or a seizure. If the violence on this occasion is minimal, (at least for for Noe), the film is still no less repellent and a lot more boring than "Irreversible".