"Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film all but subjugates its characters to its landscape. Antonioni trans-forms Ravenna, the city of Dante’s tomb, Byzantine murals and marble churches, into a terrifyingly beautiful desert of slag heaps, factories and sulphorous skies. . . . Vitti is the traumatized heroine who, in a desperate search for love, has a brief affair with the owner of a factory, which her husband manages. Prescient in its connection of existential and ecological concerns, Red Desert is . . . one of the greatest works of European cinema."—James Quandt