Around the world each year at innumerable film festivals, films which have non-linear narratives, or which otherwise experiment with film psychology or film structure, are jumped upon with glee and heaped with praise by nostalgic, over-excited film academics (briefly imagine: an over-excited film academic) and movierama cognoscenti who all like to pretend for a moment that they're at the premiere of The Bicycle Thief. In some cases, the praise is deserved, but more often than not, beyond the arty-farty artifice is a boring and derivative pile of crap. This is the case with O Fantasma.

Aimless and lonely Sergio (Ricardo Meneses) is a garbage collector who lives in a dingy flat in Lisbon with his dog, and a casual, ambivalent girlfriend. His indifference to his life is absolute, and the only thing that keeps him going is a string of anonymous and s&m sexual encounters with men at night, increasingly rough sessions to which he has become addicted.

Officially selected at the Venice Film Festival and variously proclaimed as "one of the year's ten best films" etc., by reviewers in gay and non-gay media, O Fantasma is really an overblown bore and if I wanted to spend ninety minutes meditating about looking for warmth in the lonely big city I'd go to a downtown laundromat and watch my undies spin dry on HOT. There's no reason to get excited about this film.

For a start, brooding, grainy low-budget films with little dialogue, no great plotlines and quirky camerawork are neither innovative nor new. So many such films get made every year it's not funny, as anyone who's regretted their multi-hundred dollar gold pass to their local film festival will ruefully attest. There's nothing exciting about generic independent film making from non-English language countries - they're a dime a dozen, literally. So there's no need or reason to jump up and down about the scarcity of dialogue in O Fantasma, its full-frontal nudity, its sweaty underclass milieu peopled with sexual eccentrics and its moody lighting and experimental editing. All these things have been done to death for at least the last twenty years. Steven Soderbergh's Sex Lies And Videotape - 1989 - or David Lynch's Blue Velvet - 1986 - spring to mind and they're both probably older than the lead actor of this film and they were also both worth watching.

Also, this Orientalist approach to nocturnal gay cruising - a trend carried by the similarly turgid A Year Without Love which played to packed houses at this year's Sydney Film Festival - has to stop. Voyeuristic cameras following spunky actors as they creep about Gothic inner-city locations in the after-midnight shadows to have life-changing, mind-blowing sex with equally hot strangers pursue the naive and ridiculously far-fetched idea that every anonymous gay sex experience is some kind of thrilling, flick-knife carnival. Many a night I've spent at my local cruising ground wishing I was at the laundromat watching the tumble dryer, I've been that bored. I suppose there was that time the drunk and plain-looking guy giving me a blowjob gagged a couple of times before vomiting all over my legs and pants.

Or the time I'd been drinking way too much as usual then rode my bicycle down to the cruising ground and while riding around there hit a pothole and somersaulted over the handlebars, grazing my hands and elbows and bruising my arse while a couple of twinks giggled in the distance. Or the other time when my bike got stolen while I was having sex down the back and I had to walk home and fork out five hundred bucks for a new bike. Or the countless nights I've stood around till four in the morning waiting in vain for someone else to show up. I could go on, so I'm sick to death of watching films that romanticize and treat as exotic the nocturnal gay cruising world which is really something that's generally a dull, functional well-worn convenience that occasionally pays out (on what Larry Kramer called the "jackpot nights").

O Fantasma reaches its nadir when Sergio dons a head-to-toe black latex sex suit and creeps around a deserted garbage tip in the dead of night, cuddling up to an incinerator in a "stunning" metaphoric display of his confused, desperate search for warmth. All I could think of was the first appearance of Andy Serkis as Gollum in the first Lord Of The Rings film - not yet fully CGI realised, and just a Gumby black frog-like thing hopping aimlessly around in the shadows.

Give us some interesting characters, some plot, or some kind of reason to keep watching, or leave us alone. They aren't called moving pictures for nothing.

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