Jonathanrosenbaum.net Website Review

a powerful, er*tic thriller with remarkable performances from all three of its leads (jeff bridges, john heard, and lisa eichhorn), acquire an enthusiastic cult that continues to appreciate its sensitive, offbeat mood and its indelible portrait of disaffected the film is tightly scripted by jeffrey alan fiskin and directed by the czech expatriate ivan pas*er, best known for his bittersweet czech is an in-depth portrait of the complex relations between three disaffected people.… read more » in the 1960s, he could do no wrong, especially after his hit, blow-up. in the 1980s, michelangelo antonioni emerges as a shamefully neglected figure — only one of his last four films (the pas*enger) has been released in this country. and zabriskie point, the film that virtually destroyed his american reputation, offers ample proof of both the italian director’s brilliance and his neglect of filmmaking particulars that americans seemingly will not stand for. to understand antonioni’s art, we must acknowledge that he is not a storyteller as either a plausible romance about disaffected youth or as a docu*entary rendering of 1969 america, zabriskie point is often ludicrous. but one keeps in mind that antonioni thinks through his camera more than through his scripts — and that realism is far from his intention — one can see this film as an astonishingly beautiful achievement. as the director noted at the time, “the story is certainly a simple one. nonetheless, the content is actually very complex.… read more » there are at least two intriguing recent trends reflected in the publications of geoff dyer’s zona: a book about a film about a journey to a room (new york: pantheon, 2012) and adam mars-jones’s noriko smiling (london: notting hill editions, 2011) — book-length studies of masterpieces (stalker and late spring, respectively) and film criticism by am*teurs (both of them prestigious literary brits). a couple of much older attitudes underlying both is a view of cinema as literature by another means and, conversely, a view of film