Italian New Wave director Michelangelo Antonioni was helping alter the European cinematic landscape with his bold features. One of Antonioni’s classics is the great “Blow-Up,” which is from 1966 and is one of my all-time favorite movies.

| Sep 21, 2022

Never before Blow-Up has Michelangelo Antonioni, the cinema’s bravest spelunker of the soul, come up from the depths with such a marvelous story and such gorgeous pictures of the cavernous emptiness inside modern man.

| Aug 15, 2022

Having launched a conventionally piquant little mystery story, Anonioni characteristically abandons it, and the picture slips into fantasy and closes with a pretentiously symbolic tennis match, played without rackets or ball.

| Aug 15, 2022

Intoxicating in its ambiguity.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 10, 2022

Blow-Up is a work of wit and caustic intelligence, superbly disciplined, elegantly styled, visually astonishing and, for all that, turned out with the deceptive simplicity of perfect craftsmanship.

| Nov 23, 2020

Blow-Up demands and succeeds by immersing us truly into an ambience where nothing is what it seems, including our own ability to comprehend, define, and explain.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 11, 2020

As usual, Antonioni's images have a seductive loveliness. No fashion photographer ever took more glamorous shots, or made London look more inviting.

| Mar 26, 2019

I always liked to think that even the worst film by Antonioni would be better than the best by almost any other director. Now I know that this is so, because I've just seen his worst film, and I was right: Blow-up is still an absolute must.

| Mar 21, 2018

Michelangelo Antonioni's film is an inquiry into the modernist concern of what art is and how it affects life.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jul 6, 2017

At once provocative and mystifying, dazzlingly immersive and utterly remarkable.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 10, 2017

This remains a failure for which I would trade ten successes: a totally absorbing experience on the screen, a film of deceptive, tricky surfaces and cold perceptions.

| Apr 11, 2016

Michelangelo Antonioni's first English language film is an allegorical murder mystery whose abstract parameters delineate a society where images are more important, and lasting, than reality.

| Original Score: A+ | Aug 22, 2015

Inspiring everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Mike Myers, Michelangelo Antonioni's arty thriller remains an absorbing, eerie enigma.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2013

A prize '60s artifact, Michelangelo Antonioni's what-is-truth? meditation on Swinging London is a movie to appreciate -- if not ponder.

| Feb 4, 2013

In Blow-Up [Antonioni] smothers this conflict in the kind of pompous platitudes the press loves to designate as proper to "mature," "adult," "sober" art.

| Feb 4, 2013

Despite its thriller hook, Blow-Up is less a mystery than a portrait of swinging alienation.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 4, 2013

Antonioni's first English-speaking film is a seminal work of the 1960s, reflecting swinging London as well as dealing with voyeurism, artists' social responsbilities and other relevant issues.

| Original Score: A | Mar 29, 2011

O rigor estético aqui exibido por Antonioni, somado à excepcional montagem de Frank Clarke, à bela fotografia de Carlo Di Palma e à atuação inspirada de Hemming, garante ao filme um vigor e um charme que só crescem com o tempo.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 10, 2009

This is so ravishing to look at (the colors all seem newly minted) and pleasurable to follow (the enigmas are usually more teasing than worrying) that you're likely to excuse the metaphysical pretensions.

| Jul 31, 2007

There may be some meaning, some commentary about life being a game, beyond what remains locked in the mind of film's creator, Italian director-writer Michelangelo Antonioni. But it is doubtful that the general public will get the 'message' of this film.

| Jul 31, 2007