The unorthodox British writer-director Sally Potter has divided critics and audiences with her latest film. Featuring an all-star cast, Rage is an offbeat murder mystery set in the New York fashion world. But, despite the novelty appeal of seeing Jude Law play a vampish drag queen or Judi Dench smoking a joint, dozens walked out of Saturday's advance press screening.

Best known for her 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which starred Tilda Swinton, Potter has always been an experimental, adventurous stylist. Shot in photographers' studios with nothing more than a green screen backdrop, Rage is her lowest budget production to date. It is also defiantly uncinematic, entirely composed of monologues, with all action off screen. Structured as a series of video confessionals, it feels like a filmed stage play or even an expanded radio drama.

Law has fun with his character, Minx, a narcissistic model who sports a range of outlandish wigs and an inexplicably variable accent. Besides his stunt casting, the large ensemble cast includes Dench as an acid-tongued magazine columnist, Steve Buscemi as a hard-bitten paparazzo, David Oyelowo as a Shakespeare-quoting detective, Eddie Izzard as a slimy fashion tycoon and Lily Cole as a young model. Like Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and other distinctive auteur directors, Potter makes a virtue of minimal resources by creating her own bold visual language. Each talking-head character in Rage is framed by a monolithic backdrop of bright, synthetic colour. This effect is striking and rather hypnotic.

The fatal weakness with Rage is not its poverty of resources but its poverty of ideas. Potter has hit upon an arresting style and attracted a world-class cast, only to squander both on a succession of tired platitudes about the evils of the fashion industry. Famous designers as self-aggrandising egotists? Check. Young models as vulnerable waifs? Check. Clothes made for pennies in Third World sweatshops but sold by cynical marketing men for huge profits? Well, hold the front page. “In the end,” concludes Izzard's reptilian mogul, “everything and everybody is for sale.”

Dench's sour fashion critic has a further shock revelation: “The truth hurts.” It is tempting to conclude that Potter is being ironic, mocking the facile world view of her characters, but very little else in Rage suggests that level of sophisticated self-awareness.

As a light comedy Rage is a partial success, but as a treatise on the dynamics of power and powerlessness it lacks depth or bite. Stylistically her ambitions are commendable, but in terms of substance this empress is wearing some perilously skimpy clothes.

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