Compared to movies, period, L'Avventura is good. But "good" for Antonioni is too flat and monotonous a praise, much like this picture.

| Sep 2, 2020

Rightly considered to be a cinematic landmark.

| Apr 5, 2017

Antonioni's cool, beautifully photographed film isn't really a mystery and certainly not a thriller. Audiences over the years have delighted in deciding what it really is all about.

Full Review | Apr 5, 2017

For those who love obscure European cinema this is one of the true masterpieces.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 5, 2017

The adventure was not merely sexual, however, but a radical rethink of film language: the characters' motivations were left opaque and unexplained, and the story never quite resolves itself -- rather like life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 10, 2016

Antonioni's film rewrote the language of cinema, questioning its addiction to storytelling and opening up the possibility for other, more enigmatic and poetic forms of expression.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 1, 2014

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 1, 2013

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.

| Jul 6, 2010

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.

| May 27, 2009

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.

| Jul 31, 2007

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.

| Feb 9, 2006

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.

| May 20, 2003

Characters root themselves separately in background and foreground planes, their emotional distance rendered via the director's unnerving use of deep focus.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 12, 2002

L'Avventura becomes a place in our imagination -- a melancholy moral desert.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 1, 2000