Rating: 
Summary: A CLASSIC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Review: WHAT MORE COULD ONE WANT: ACTION, THRILLING, SUSPENSE, NOT TO MENTION THE STUNNING PROVACATIVE VANESSA REDGRAVE. ADD TO THAT JEFF BECK & THE YARDBIRDS WITH JIMMY PAGE BRING THE BEST OF MUSIC TO THE FOREFRONT OF THIS GREAT MOVIE.
Rating:
Summary: A lesson in credibility
Review: For an American viewer BLOW UP should be a lesson in character credibility. The film is all about the life style of a hot-shot photographer who stumbles on to a crime. You are wasting your time going off into the artsy atmosphere expecting to find something else. I loved this film because it was honest enough to take time for the purpose of providing the depth of Thomas' [Hemmings] ability and range as a photographer. Once you knew who Thomas was, you believed in his photo genius. I can't figure out why Sara Miles played a role. She did nothing to advance the story. Vanessa in her late 20s gave a dandy performance of a mysterious woman. From time to time the director treats you to sexy scenes of underfed British photographer models and would-be models. Those scenes hold your interest while you are spending time learning about Thomas' photography skills. For Americans you'll be delighted to know that the British slang is minimal. A "doss house" is a flop house. That's about it. I enjoyed this honest movie.
Rating: 
Summary: Do you remember when angst was young?
Review: I read Antonioni's "That Bowling Alley on the Tiber", and being impressed by his written thought I looked for some of his films. "Blow Up" is the one most likely to be in your local video store.As cultural history (or mythography) it's priceless. Some people see Austin Powers in it; myself, I keep expecting the Avengers. Mrs. Peel in a catsuit (or Tara King in a miniskirt) would be right at home. Visually it's delicious. The thin flanks of English girls rolling around in a huge sheet of purple paper, our hero (chest bare and hairless) helping the delivery man bring in the enormous propeller. Noisy mimes sweeping through London like locusts. A roomful of Mods staring silent at the wailing Yardbirds. The cinematography is perfect. So what's the point? What's the point of all the murder-mystery setup if we're not going to have an explanation? The point is, naturally, that there is no point. In 1966 this was shocking and important. In 2001, there's the sense that we've been through that revelation and come out the other side ("My parents went through an existential crisis, and all I got was this lousy NASDAQ"). But that doesn't mean that we don't need to be reminded now and then. And if nothing else, it's refreshing to remember a time when the meaninglessness of existence and the indeterminacy of truth were still thrilling and scary, rather than vaguely problematic bits of the background scenery. See it.
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Summary: Life may not exist
Review: The strangest film on British society I have ever seen. Life is nothing but a big show of illusions. You may have the picture of the gun in the hand of the killer, the picture of the victim, the picture of the accessory of the crime, and even the body in front of you, yet, everything is an illusion as soon as the pictures disappear. Life is only a sequence of transient pictures. Reality does not exist. It is a game of tennis without any ball nor any racket. You are just pretending, and the voyeurs we are are just moved around in vague reflections of what reality might be if it existed. That was a time when we preferred illusions to real life, and our happiness in that flow of images was to follow the trend and to pretend, to pick a ball that did not exist and to send it back to the players who were mimes of what true life could have been if we had not been born in a non-existent cloud. Superb. Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, Paris Universities II and IX.
Rating:
Summary: Let's get past our hatred for mimes, shall we?
Review: Although Antonioni never made another film as perfect as "L'Avventura", this is an undeniable classic for its intrinsic merits (the film-developing scene is one of the great set-pieces in cinema history), its unargued influence over other film-makers (De Palma doesn't count - ugh), and its unsurpassed depiction of one of Western culture's more memorable "scenes". (And let us not forget the righteous middle finger it extended to not-dead-yet Catholic Legion of Decency by including a glimpse of pubic hair - the first, according to Amos Vogel, in any mainstream film.)
Rating:
Summary: Love it
Review: "Blow Up" is a very interesting film that gives way to many interpretations. David Hemmings is very hip and charming, smokes weed, and makes out with young models (hmmm does this film objectify women?) and seems very happy with his self absorbed life. He drives around in a convertible and buys a WWII propeller for unclear reasons. I think that Hemmings is the ultimate hedonist, rather than search for the truth, he would rather pursue the physical pleasures he can extort from Vanessa Redgrave. This film shows us his moment to change, The universe is extending to him, the opportunity to "do the right thing" to be benevolent, to take action. But ultimately, it is simply too much work and what is morally right cannot compete with the pleasures of drugs and sex. He throws the tennis ball back to the mimes, he's not the one to change things. I really like this film, with its 60s hairstyles and clothes, and its great cinematography. It is really entertaining and a great film to watch multiple times.
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Summary: A Popular Art?
Review: Poor Antonioni. He learned - the hard way - that the nature of Film derives from its strange popular basis. How else did MGM get in on the backing of 'Blow Up?' The film's success probably had less to to do with Antonioni's oblique look at swinging London than with the whole Mod scene it coincidentally highlights - the frenetic life of a fashion photographer, the scantily-clad models, the rock-and-roll bands, the impromptu orgies (the best are always impromptu), the (real or imagined) murders, the attempted blackmail. Antonioni's mistake was that we could never pin down his attitude toward such subject matter. Surely the man who created 'L'avventura' was only interested in the surfaces of his subject (it had no depths to speak of)? Surely he was cleverly disparaging the lifestyle of this idiot photographer? Fact is, Antonioni was secretly in love with it. Just as he would be duped by the stupidities enacted in 'Zabriskie Point.' He wasn't as objective as his better admirers believed. He was middle-aged. He was Italian. And he was getting over Monica Vitti. 'Blow Up' is fascinating, all the same. And it certainly doesn't deserve some of the comments of the uninitiated - outcasts of the "Film Generation," who wouldn't know an art film if it fell on them....
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Summary: A disturbing parable...
Review: Michelangelo Antonioni's BLOW-UP offers us a subtle and disturbing reading of the modern world. The film follows a day in the life of Thomas, a young hotshot fashion photographer (based on the notorious David Bailey), played with puckish insolence by David Hemmings. Antonioni's particular brand of phenomenological Neorealism is based on the idea of the camera lens as a way of exposing the ultimate truth, or lack thereof, that underlies the surface of the world. We watch as Thomas investigates his photographs, scrutinizing them obsessively and blowing them up larger and larger so that eventually they become nothing more than an abstract collection of dots - a kind of Rorschach test in which almost anything can be read. The received cultural baggage of the image is eliminated until all that remains is purest subjectivity of the spectator. Once this threshold of semiotic referentiality has been crossed, the suspicion of a murder in the park gleaned from a series of augmented photographs would seem to say more about Thomas' own paranoid state of mind than what his camera may or may not have recorded. This subtextual aspect of the film has been compared to the controversy surrounding the various interpretations of the Abraham Zapruder film as a definitive and reliable record of the Kennedy assassination, and in particular, the mystery of the notorious 'grassy knoll.' The possible incidence of adultery and The Girl's desperate efforts to retrieve the negatives seem an oblique reference to the scandalous fallout of the Profumo affair. Vanessa Redgrave, with her thick, dark brown hair and affected temptress-naïf manner (hinted at by a schoolgirl outfit and arms folded seductively over her breasts) seems meant to evoke, for a British audience at least, then-recent memories of Christine Keeler. Thomas himself resembles Odysseus in the way he is continually thwarted by chance meetings that cause him to lose sight of his mission, and the film's meandering, episodic structure does indeed seem to contain elements of classical epic. His shirtless tryst with The Girl, for example, recalls Odysseus' first encounter on the beach with Nausíkaa, and the rock concert and marijuana party he attends afterward suggests a journey through the Land of the Lotus-Eaters. Like Antonioni's earlier LA NOTTE, the action of BLOW-UP takes place entirely within the span of twenty-four hours. It follows the travails of a solitary person in a highly subjective manner, with the unmediated banality of his experience conveyed through relentless longueurs and temps morts - roughly approximating, in stripped down cinematic language, the narrative design of James Joyce's ULYSSES. But just like Godard in LE MÉPRIS, Antonioni inverts the themes of Joyce's novel by revealing the search for human contact in sex as a spiritual dead end and showing man as ultimately bewildered, uncomprehending, and impotent before the demands of the modern world. As a self-referential odyssey through the heart of a modern city, BLOW-UP seems a trenchant comment on the nature of success and what it does to people. It certainly was Antonioni's greatest commercial success (as a struggling film student in Bologna during the Fascist era, the director was also a champion tennis player who had to sell his trophies to buy food and pay the rent). New wealth and creature comforts can often bring us a false sense of power and security, which eventually turns to disillusionment, and even a desperate feeling of helplessness, when we come to learn of mysterious (and perhaps malign) forces existing outside the scope of our control and understanding. Here, the Marxist Antonioni demonstrates once again that this malaise of modern life is not caused by technology and consumer culture but rather by man's failure to adapt to the conditions of the new environment he has created for himself.
Rating: 
Summary: What?
Review: You can call me a Philistine, but this film bored me to tears. Many scenes are horribly dated. Now, that may not be a fair criticism, but I couldn't help but think of Austin Powers at times, which can be distracting when one is trying to watch such a terribly serious meditation on reality and illusion. The scenes involving the revelation of the mystery in the park via photograph were involving. I can also appreciate the fact that Antonioni wasn't interested in making a typical Hollywood-type thriller in which the hero learns all of the secrets and punishes the wrong-doers. There were glimpses of a good film here, but that's all. Besides, any film with a scene in which mimes are taken seriously loses me.
Rating:
Summary: Antonioni's Most Accessible Film
Review: Mid-way through this arresting 60s classic is a scene where David Hemmings, playing a somewhat disaffected and selfish photographer, goes to a rock club to listen to the Yardbirds. As he covets EVERYTHING he sees (boy wouldn't this prove to be cultural prophecy?), he goes out of his way to get hold of the arm of a smashed guitar, only to realize he doesn't know what it is FOR or WHY he really wants it. Such are the people who populate BLOW UP and the bulk of Antonioni films: modern people who don't look inside much, adrift in consumerism and pop trash, bumping from one sensation to the next. Interwoven into this quagmire of sleeping souls is a non-plot about perception and the "nothing is what it seems" theory that ranks up there with Roeg in content if not pizzazz, and that went on to have its bones picked by Coppola and DePalma in "The Conversation" and "Blow Out" respectively. BLOW UP is a curious time capsule: we see the incursion of the middle East into London, fashions so old they look new; Herbie Hancock's still-hip organ-based jazz themes which have already been redone by acid jazz groups and sampled by Dee-Lite; Veruschka looking very svelte and sexy; and David Hemmings as handsome as he would ever be. Sure, Antonioni's only weakness was wrapping up the last 30 seconds of his films, and that flaw surfaces here with the mime troupe as it does with the last oblique images of "The Eclipse", but I still want this one on DVD, anyway.
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