An essential retrospective surveys the career of this most elegant proponent of cinematic modernism, from early melodramas through landmarks like Red Desert, Blow-Up, and The Passenger-all visually compelling and still amazingly resonant. "Would it be too much to simply say, 'Go see them all'? This is the kind of retro that can make . . . the enlightened out of the curious."-Time Out N.Y.
Read full descriptionShorts made between 1997 and 2004 range from a return to the island of L'avventura to a moving self-portrait. With Making a Film for Me Is Life, a documentary shot during the making of Beyond the Clouds.
Completed with help from Wim Wenders after Antonioni suffered a stroke, with John Malkovich playing the director's alter ego, this series of vignettes offers "moments of such astounding visual power . . . that you are all but transported through the screen to a place where the physical and emotional weather fuse into a palpable sadness."-N.Y. Times
A meditation on China in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. “The rarest of rare, this epic documentary is as legendary as it is unseen.”-Cinematheque Ontario
In 1982, Antonioni returned to the themes of his great ‘60s films-alienation and ennui among the well-to-do-for this enigmatic, erotic work. “A brilliant, glittering piece of filmmaking . . . stunningly beautiful.”-Sight & Sound
Over 30 years later, Antonioni's 1975 film “still packs a wallop. . . . This moody Jack Nicholson political thriller remains a great, bizarre film, full of beauty, mystery, and riddles with no answers.”-Chicago Tribune
Antonioni filmed the '60s war between radical and straight cultures in L.A. and Death Valley. “A sorrowing, stranger's-eye view of modern America.”-Time Out
An illuminating collection of clips and interviews. With short The Last Sequence of The Passenger.
Three moral tales observe the dehumanized behavior of postwar youth; aimlessness is reflected in the landscape as much as in the action.
Rare, early shorts made between 1943 and 1965 document the lives of villagers and street cleaners, models and lovers.
“This strong early feature . . . focuses on a woman who returns to her native city of Turin to open a fashion salon, and on the troubled wealthy young men and women she gets to know. Masterfully directed in Antonioni's choreographic manner, with strong melancholic undertones.”-Chicago Reader
“Simply put, the key movie of the 1960s. Set in a vividly mod Swinging London, Antonioni's first English-language film (is) a cryptic murder mystery . . . a landmark of the decade's observational outrage and Pop disposability.”-Time Out
Adapted from a drama by Cocteau, the story of a queen (Monica Vitti), her king, a poet, and treachery and murder in an unidentified kingdom. “A work of dazzling ambition and achievement.”-Time. With short Antonioni visto da Antonioni.
A Milanese shopgirl becomes a movie actress, but not a great one, in this expressive early melodrama. "Antonioni transcends the traditional hypocrisies of the soap-opera genre, [yet] never loses touch with the throbbing feelings of his characters."-Village Voice
Monica Vitti on a desert island in "a mystery that casually abandons its ostensible premise midway through. . . . Cinema as temporal sculpture, L'Avventura [was] among the most influential of '60s movies."-Village Voice. "The first (and the definitive) film about the diminishing attention span of a modern world."-N.Y. Times
Antonioni's first feature is loosely based on The Postman Always Rings Twice, but turns a torrid love story into a tale of corruption and betrayal in postwar industrial society.
“A stripped-down existential drama . . . an angry working man wanders impulsively through a world that has no place for him. Pervasive mist, fluid compositions, and melancholy piano add to the disorientation.”-Village Voice
"Antonioni's 1962 masterpiece showcases Monica Vitti as his moodiest, most evasive heroine, drifting out of one affair and into another with Alain Delon's mercurial stockbroker."-Village Voice. "Perhaps the director's most savage blast of gorgeous B&W ennui."-Time Out
Novelist Marcello Mastroianni and his wife Jeanne Moreau play out a drama of marital disillusionment against Antonioni's rigorous sense of place and architecture.
Antonioni's first color film draws images of alarming beauty from environmental apocalypse as an industrialist's wife (Monica Vitti) suffers a nervous breakdown. “Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity.”-Time