The Berlin Film Festival continued Sunday with critics' first look at Rage, the fashion-world mystery featuring Jude Law's revolutionary turn as a model. Just, you know, a female one.

That novelty, alas, was not enough for some critics, including the London Times's roundly unimpressed Stephen Dalton:

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. [...] 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.

The frowny faces at Screen Daily ("It's just as well Jude Law looks good as a transsexual. Because there's little else on offer for the audience") and indieWIRE ("[W]ould exclude all but the most dedicated arthouse audiences") seem to concur. It's too bad; you'd think a man of Law's totemic, penis-rescuing stature would command even the harshest critics' goodwill for at least a few stinkers. Here's hoping the later reviews keep his on- and off-screen bravery in mind before further half-hearted dismissals.