Exquisitely rendered ennui. Criterion’s Blu-ray edition of Red Desert will take you there.
The people are characters as much as the waves, dresses, paintings, train whistles, and high heels clacking against stone are.
Ingmar Bergman dies in the morning. Michelangelo Antonioni dies at night. On the same day. In the middle of summer.
Durgnat’s core strength was his refusal to be seduced by intellectual fashion.
The unsurpassed beauty of Antonioni’s visual art lifts his two-penny story and hollow people into the exalted realm of the senses.
A fantastic package of an essential and rare Antonioni feature, surely one of the best DVDs of the year.
A fatalistic tale of identity, destiny, coincidence, existential malaise, and the boundaries between the real and the imagined.
It is an anthological example of attentive students surpassing their teacher.
Great sound. Excellent image. Crucial commentary. A must-have.
Blowup daringly suggests that an image without politics isn’t an image at all.
L’Avventura, the first movement in Antonioni’s great tetralogy, remains the most haunting representation of the ennui of modern life.