"The mystery, the compositions, the island rocks, and, most of all, Monica Vitti, standing against a wall, biting her lower lip, with that hair, and eyes, and nose."

"I found it impossible to take my eyes off of Monica Vitti and her hair! Existentialism and bourgeois complacency aside, one of the real features is that thick blonde hair."

"Enigmatic portraits of anomic drift and modern soul-sickness that are also crystalline dissections of their moments (postwar industrialization, the AIDS era), featuring two master classes in screen acting by Monica Vitti and Julianne Moore."

"Enigmatic portraits of anomic drift and modern soul-sickness that are also crystalline dissections of their moments (postwar industrialization, the AIDS era), featuring two master classes in screen acting by Monica Vitti and Julianne Moore."

"When I first saw this at university, in 1960, I found it boring. Yet something made me watch it a second time that same term, and I fell under the spell of Antonioni’s mesmeric camera movements, his grasp of love and its heartaches, and above all the impassioned beauty of Monica Vitti. The film looks as freshly minted as if it had just been released."

"A dice roll—it could have been L’avventura or La notte, but I rewatched this recently and was blown away by Antonioni’s mastery and control, and his epic nihilistic vision of upper-middle-class despair is sweeping and unrivaled. Alain Delon and Monica Vitti are the most gorgeous couple in ’60s international cinema—embalmed and yet completely alive. The trilogy is one of the great achievements in twentieth-century film."

"It was hard to choose one Antonioni film, but Red Desert feels like the perfect summation of Antonioni’s work. Antonioni used color for the first time in order to show psychological imbalance and subjectivity. He depicted the modern alienation surrounding the industrial fog that’s imposed upon our lives in urban environments, and he shows how these forces can threaten our sanity. The film also has the most freakishly uncomfortable sex scene, which turns an entire room pink. Only Monica Vitti has that power"

"We see this same edge space in this film, especially in the sequence at the end . . . new buildings facing barren open space and roads leading nowhere. I saw this at the Cinémathèque française recently. I was a little late for the screening, so I had to sit in the front row, in front of the sixty-foot screen, in the main cinema. An intense experience to be totally dominated by the images of this film. The last shot of Monica Vitti, where she stares into the camera, actually pinned me to my seat!"

"Antonioni’s best film. This movie puts me into such a pleasurable deep funk. Profound, chic, visual existentialism has always been up my alley. Every image is boldly striking—from the hustle and bustle of the stock market (as timely as today’s headlines) to the urban architectural landscapes to the lovers Monica Vitti and Alain Delon. The last are especially easy on the eyes. This movie caters to the intellectual fantasy in many of us. If you are a professional philosopher or lay thinker (like myself) who likes to contemplate the nature of “reality,” the last ten minutes will totally blow your circuits. This is one very cool movie. Richard Peña’s commentary has so much information, minute for minute, you wonder how the guy keeps it all in his head."