Rating: 
Summary: Red Desert withstands the sands of time
Review: Sure, the pacing is slow compared to today's hyper/cyber entertainments, but Antonioni's visuals are still incomparable. Scene after scene resembles nothing so much as a Matisse canvas, and the final shot is a stunner. Lovely, achingly felt picture.
Rating: 
Summary: A Superb Study
Review: The usual cliche about Antonioni films is that they are studies of bored and alienated people, and are themselves vague and uninteresting. This line was started by Pauline Kael and is repeated by Leonard Maltin above, with not a second thought. But it is utterly wrong, and never more so than in the case of Red Desert. The main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti) is not bored - she is if anything too sensitively engaged with the world. She suffers from it as an artist suffers, feeling it in every part of her. (Her point of view is represented by Antonioni's careful abstract compositions, his beautiful use of colour.) But she also feels the lack of her husband's and son's love and it is this that drives her into an to attraction to Corrado (Richard Harris). He in turn is attracted to her and pretends to a closeness that he doesn't fully feel. The dynamics of this seduction are beautifully observed and movingly real.But it is the character of Giuliana that drives the film. She seems to possess an integrity in her suffering that sets her apart. Antonioni seems to be searching her soul as he allows the camera to dwell on her expressions of hurt and desperation (as Godard did with Anna Karina). And Monica Vitti is so beautiful that it is ultimately painful to watch her. But as for the standard opinion - the only people who could be bored by this film are those who are bored with feeling itself. This is a masterpiece of observed sensitivity - a study of the heart's war on consciousness. It must be seen.
Rating:
Summary: you should own this beautiful film
Review: This film is as stark as they come. It begins with lingering shots of an industrial waste land and a confused Monica Vitti wandering aimless within it. Vitti we slowly find out has had some sort of break down and each sequence of the film serves to elaborate the distance she has fallen away from reality. She attempts to find relief from her mental anguish by having an affair with a man who seems to intuitively understand her but the affair does not bring peace to her troubled state of mind. Though Antonioni's first color film this is not what I would call a "beautiful" film. What is striking about Antonionis use of color is how he uses it like a painter uses color and thats to express emotions. For instance Richard Harris' apartment has grey walls but the morning after when Vitti wakes up the walls are a soft pink. It is a striking effect to use colors to describe emotional states. Perhaps this is the scene the other reviewer found to be "beautiful". Most of the film is striking only because it is so stark. Never before or since has any film maker lingered on such ugly things like smoke stacks and industrial waste and the rusting hulls of ships as Antonioni does here. Antonioni purposely makes the world ugly in order to stress that for Vitti at least the world feels uninhabitable. I can think of three great films in the 1960's that dealt with a womans breakdown: Bergman's Persona, Polanski's Repulsion, and this one. Polanski no doubt admired Antonionis color palette and in Rosemary's Baby applies some of the same techniques. I think perhaps the people who will most enjoy this film will be lovers of modern painting, especially European painters of the post war period like Tapies--a painter whose work is often evoked in this film as well as other Antonioni films. Antonioni composes his shots like a painter and is ever sensitive to the way his figures are defined by what he surrounds them with as much as what they do or say. Always an interesting experience to watch an Antonioni but his films do take patience and are definitely for people who already have a taste for existential meditation whether it be in the novel, the museum or in the cinema. I would not suggest starting with this film if you are new to this director. L'Avventura and La Notte are the two I would begin with.
Rating:
Summary: One of the great ones
Review: This film is not flawless. The "bedtime story" interlude goes nowhere and the casting of Richard Harris, however commercially expedient it may have been in 1965, can only be lamented today. But Antonioni's gift as a visual stylist (stunningly summarized in the career montage they put together for him during the Oscar show a couple of years ago) may have reached its peak here. The film certainly deserves the best restoration and transfer it can be given at this late date.
Rating: 
Summary: Long Desert, Almost Empty
Review: This film, although gorgeous to watch, is not something easy to behold. Most of the dialogue is mundane and tedious and the protagonists are annoying, spoiled and confounded bourgeoisie. Antonni drags us through their life and its like being dragged along some empty desert by a blind horse. What does he expect from us? Does he want us to side with the ill-fated Monnica Viti who eventually commits suicide in the end? Or does he want us to show that the desert is something very temporary? Either way, the film is a perfect blend of abstract philosophy devoted to these issues, its not entertaining, but neither is reading Hegel.
Rating:
Summary: Get this orange-tinted video ...
Review: Tinted with orange it may be, but this film is so beautiful, it hardly matters. I wouldn't want to be without a copy of this film, and a machine to play it on, any more than I would want to be without a copy of my favorite novel. Or a volume of prints of my favorite artist, perhaps, or... You get the idea. RED DESERT is a MAJOR KEEPER. (Note: no VHS edition I have seen suffers from much of any negative 'orange tinting' effect.)
Rating:
Summary: The Last of Antonioni's Italy
Review: When Red Desert was released, even the most ardent Antonioni fans expressed grave concern. Then Michelangelo abandoned Italy. In hindsight (always a precarious vantage point), this film is in many ways far superior to his subsequent work (the once popular 'Blow-Up' has dated terribly). The problem with the film is Monica Vitti's character. Is she psychotic? If so, it makes everything she experiences suspect. Richard Harris is suitably stolid as her befuddled husband. In later years, Harris confessed that he found Antonioni to be a "pseudo-intellectual." This, from the Man Called Horse! But what does the film try to say about our industrialized world? Antonioni was obviously fascinated by it and by its implications, as contemporary interviews suggest. But his film seems to present it as a nightmare - through which poor Monica Vitti stumbles, bewildered.
Rating:
Summary: The Last of Antonioni's Italy
Review: When Red Desert was released, even the most ardent Antonioni fans expressed grave concern. Then Michelangelo abandoned Italy. In hindsight (always a precarious vantage point), this film is in many ways far superior to his subsequent work (the once popular 'Blow-Up' has dated terribly). The problem with the film is Monica Vitti's character. Is she psychotic? If so, it makes everything she experiences suspect. Richard Harris is suitably stolid as her befuddled husband. In later years, Harris confessed that he found Antonioni to be a "pseudo-intellectual." This, from the Man Called Horse! But what does the film try to say about our industrialized world? Antonioni was obviously fascinated by it and by its implications, as contemporary interviews suggest. But his film seems to present it as a nightmare - through which poor Monica Vitti stumbles, bewildered.
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