Popular reviews

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 2

  Possibly Antonioni's most brilliant and profound work, where modernist neurosis and alienation are not born of circumstances that must be eliminated but rather are conditions that the human must adapt too, as the history of human development catches up with the development of their technological creations. A documentary on what it is to be alive today: the void is life.

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 2

  83

  Howling loneliness - a world so mechanical, people have forgotten how to be humans. Antonioni breaks down opaque connections to their limits, finding truth in little details (a lack of subtitles makes an emotional cross-road akin to an unheard cry for help) and a festering alien score which rises as the fog seems to overtake the bodies swimming through it. Paranoid and sensual.

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  Review by Vladimir ★★★★★ 3

  I live in a remote area because of my job. An area that has nothing except for a huge factory and some small rooms for the employees. They call it a complex, I call it a cemetery.

  Every time I go into my room I feel the emptiness it feels. The small bed right beside the small couch and near the dirty window there is a four-legged green chair but one of the legs is broken so I don't use it anymore and that's why it looks lonely. The four white walls, I call them the walls of desire, they call me the man who's afraid of himself, the man who created such a lonely atmosphere then he died because…

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  Review by Josiah Morgan ★★★★★ 4

  A film that acts outside our existence, transcending some unseen realm that fits between the spaces. You know that feeling when you walk into a room and forget why you were there? Or those times you're in a crowd but feel like the only person? Red Desert is a film of these distinct yet familiar emotions - it's Antonioni doing Tarr, the weathered face of humanity against a nondescript background, the innocents shown against a backdrop of industry.

  Monica Vitti is a goddess and as she wanders among blackened piles of dust (shown to us in a similar, yet far rougher manner than Antonioni would later use in Zabriskie Point) it's difficult to imagine anyone else fulfilling this role -…

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★★ 31

  Towards the end of Red Desert, Monica Vitti’s Giuliana declares that there’s something terrible about reality but that she doesn’t know what it is. In saying this, she cuts to the core of the film. This feature presents a cold, industrialised world of endemic loneliness and misunderstanding.

  There is a stain at the heart of society, proclaimed through the wide assortment of dull or disgusting imagery. It is Antonioni’s first foray into colour and he uses this extra tool to highlight how colourless modern life is. Most of the compositions are full of bleak monotony: browns and greys and fading hues. This is a film full of problems and deep sadness, but the precise nature of the central issues is…

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  Review by Janica ★★★★★

  Imagine my surprise when, for once in an Antonioni movie, a character protoself-consciously voices her own problems with the world: worrying about a mysterious malady afflicting her son, Monica Vitti exclaims “If you won’t tell me what’s wrong, how can I help you?” AMEN. Although in theme this film is generally similar to his previous three films, Red Desert definitely seems a transitional work. Strangely though, the continuity of transition seems to be bridging the gap between L’Eclisse and Zabriskie Point and not the strongly plot oriented film that followed it with, Blow-Up. What that film and this have in common, however, is a shift for Antonioni from a duo character setup to the focus on a singular suffering soul. It is a technique, in…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 1

  The great model for how-to film interiority.

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  Review by emma katharine ★★★ 2

  i get it but i don't care.

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  Review by spap1 ★★★★½ 3

  the last half an hour of this film left me literally gasping for breath so bare with me with the writing of this. 

  this is honestly one of the most fascinating films i’ve ever seen and definitely a new favourite of mine, up there with L’Eclisse, and another life changing film from Antonioni. 

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  Deep down one doesn’t know what one believes.

  the isolation that pursues from being ‘left behind’ in a time of the past, trapped within an ancient relic that manifests itself in the carcass of your mind, left wounded and destroyed by the changing times, yet not given the help, not the need, and not even being able to conjure up the desire, to force through a…

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  Review by Daisoujou ★★★★½ 8

  This was my second viewing, and I don't know how I didn't like this on the first one.

  I've seen three Antonioni films thus far (this, Blow Up, and La Notte), and I find them all incredibly hard to talk or write about. It's like they directly transmit a feeling into my brain and it's fairly indescribable. I could use words like alienation and loneliness but that feels more like parroting what people say about Red Desert than actually describing the experience of watching it. Nonetheless, I want to try to engage with what this movie made me feel. The technical aspects are essentially perfect, so rather than my usual attempts at being a knockoff film critic, I'm going to…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★★★ 12

  “There’s something terrible about reality but I don’t know what it is... no one will tell me”

  Isolation and neurosis in an industrialized wasteland. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film may, in part, be a condemnation of industry and the oppression that comes with it, but I think what Red Desert predominantly attempts to convey is the lack of ability to adjust and conform to the post-war landscape of Europe in the 1960s. Monica Vitti’s character—and the accident she suffers before the events of the film—could be seen a metaphor for this collective strive towards some form of adjustment and a return to normality that the continent as a whole, specifically Italy in this case, so desperately craved. The film is also a meditation…

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  Review by Marcissus ★★★★★

  The factory workers are undergoing a venomous strike, the air is brimming with smoke and fire and salt and the inhuman sounds of machines talking to each other about their life goals. All Giuliana (Monica Vitti) can think about is buying a half eaten sandwich for twenty smackeroos, dressed in a vibrant green overcoat in the middle of the drab and dreary sludge that absorbs the rest of the frame and the lives of its disinterested and drained strikers. Her actions are somewhat incomprehensible at first, but as she unravels on screen into the mangled mesh of her former person the distortion begins to clear. Ghostly sounds recorded from deep below the Earths surface materialize from nowhere throughout, the audience…