[The scene where the young woman offers herself to the photographer in exchange for the film is the most important incident] in the long chain of circumstances out of which Michelangelo Antonioni has expertly fashioned the fuse that finally ignites his Blow-Up, which seems to me one of the finest, most intelligent, least hysterical expositions of the modern existential agony we have yet had on film. The most obvious of its many endlessly discussible implications—that we are so submerged in sensation and its pursuit that we cannot feel genuine emotion any more—is hardly novel. But the cool specificity of Antonioni's imagery (it always reminds me of Henri Cartier-Bresson's great still photography), his effortless, wonderfully intelligent control of his medium, the feeling he conveys of knowing precisely what he wants to say, and the sense that his perfection of style grows organically out of his awareness, not...