L'avventura 1960

Andrew Sarris, Village Voice: A graduate of Screenwriting 1-2 might dismiss this method as casualness or even carelessness, but every shot and bit of business in L'Avventura represents calculation of the highest order. Read more

Bosley Crowther, New York Times: Like a breathless storyteller who has a long and detailed story to tell and is so eager to get on to the big doings that he forgets to mention several important things, Signor Antonioni deals only with what seems to interest him. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: It's a work that requires some patience -- a 145-minute mystery that strategically elides any conventional denouement -- but more than amply repays the effort. Read more

Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune: It's easy to bash Antonioni as passe. It's harder, I think, to explain the cinematic power of the way his camera watches, and waits, while the people on screen stave off a dreadful loneliness. Read more

Zachary Wigon, L.A. Weekly: Antonioni created, as the Cannes jury put it in 1960, a new language of cinema, one that perfectly expressed a modern alienation that's enduring as well as the film. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: L'Avventura becomes a place in our imagination -- a melancholy moral desert. Read more

Geoff Andrew, Time Out: If it once seemed the ultimate in arty, intellectually chic movie-making, the film now looks all too studied and remote a portrait of emotional sterility. Read more

Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic: The first ten minutes make it clear that this is the work of a discerning, troubled, uniquely gifted artist who speaks to us through the refined center of his art. Read more