Rate Michelangelo Antonioni films

I can't totally get past the ineptitude of the leads in ZP, but there is a charming quality to them in a way. I definitely agree that they were cast for their looks mostly; Antonioni is one of the most "painterly" of filmmakers, so the color of someone's eyes (like Daria's, which are striking) or somesuch is more important to him than if they can deliver a grand monologue convincingly.

Looked at as an almost totally abstracted film, more of a painting than a traditional narrative, ZP is pretty much a resounding success. It also, along with the even more masterful Blow-Up, foreshadows the sense of pure "emptiness," cessation, drift, that is so central to The Passenger. I get the feeling Antonioni had been working toward Passenger (or, at least, what the film does) for some time. It feels like a culmination of all his aesthetic tendencies. Everything Antonioni directed afterward was quite different in style, and indeed he said around the time Identification of a Woman came out that with that film he wanted to change his approach, as if he had exhausted it, finally achieved perfection (or an approximation thereof) with The Passenger.