Michelangelo Antonioni's "trilogy of urban alienation" (L'Avventura, La Notte and Eclipse) made him an art house darling. But by the time of Red Desert, Antonioni had almost exhausted his theme and simply rehashed it in colour, taking his symbolism to artistic extremes as streets are repainted and a room changes hue. The story, though, is opaque - Monica Vitti plays a manic depressive who sleeps with her husband's friend (Richard Harris). Vitti is, as ever, convincingly neurotic, but Harris is totally miscast, dubbed and barely a presence. While Antonioni deserves praise for being prescient in his warning of the danger of industrial pollution, most viewers will regard this as pretentious twaddle, no matter how beautiful the photography. This is a movie by a director who has come to believe his own press.

In an industrializing Italian town, a married woman, rendered mentally unstable after a traffic accident, drifts into an affair with a friend of her husband.