The best of Antonioni’s three English-language pictures.
The Passenger (1975)
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Reviews Counted:63
Fresh:57
Rotten:6
Average Rating:8.1/10
Consensus: Antonioni's classic, a tale of lonely, estranged characters on a journey though the mysterious landscapes of identity, shimmers with beauty and uncertainty.
Theatrical Release:Oct 28, 2005 Limited
Box Office: $359
Synopsis: Originally released in 1975, The Passenger is, on the simplest level, a suspense story about a man trying to escape his own life. This haunting film is a portrait of a drained journalist, played by... Originally released in 1975, The Passenger is, on the simplest level, a suspense story about a man trying to escape his own life. This haunting film is a portrait of a drained journalist, played by Jack Nicholson, whose deliverance is an identity exchange with a dead man. The film was shot on location and takes Nicholson on an incredible journey through Africa, Spain, Germany and England. As with all of Antonioni's work, however, there is another dimension. From beginning to end we are witnessing a probing study of the human condition. The protagonist's fate reflects each individual's own private thoughts about real and/or imagined destiny. The climax of the film, alone – a final sequence lasting seven minutes and taking eleven days to shoot is truly a synthesis of the movie and a tribute to the director's art. Antonioni, in talking about his motion picture, says: "I consider The Passenger my most stylistically mature film. I also consider it a political film as it is topical and fits with the dramatic rapport of the individual in today's society." The Passenger brought together two of the screen's most exciting personalities, Jack Nicholson and Maria Schneider, who had become an overnight sensation opposite Marlon Brando in "Last Tango in Paris." The Passenger is based on an original story by Mark Peploe and was filmed from a screenplay by Peploe, Peter Wollen and Antonioni. This preferred director's cut is the version of the film that was originally released in Europe under the title Professione: reporter. --© Sony Pictures Classics [More]
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry
Starring: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider, Jenny Runacre, Ian Hendry, Steven Berkoff, Charles Mulvehill
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Screenwriter: Michelangelo Antonioni
Story: Mark Peploe
Screenwriter: Mark Peploe
Producer: Carlo Ponti
Studio: Sony Pictures Classics
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Reviews for The Passenger
They don't make 'em like this anymore, and contemporary audiences may need to adjust their expectations a bit in order to fully appreciate this deliberately paced, largely understated character study.
A fascinating artifact of the last gasp of a kind of international cinema that more or less ended the same year this came out.
The Passenger is one of the most fascinating film odysseys of the 1970s. I think someone invented the word cinema for films like this.
The Passenger is a marvel of quiet insight in many ways, not least of which is the chance to view Jack Nicholson before he became JACK NICHOLSON.
...keep your eye on the girl -- she may be the key to getting this curiously languid movie.
The final shot, a long tracking shot that hints at what's going on outside the journalist's world and inside his head, is a marvel.
If you're willing to wait and give it a little bit of effort, Antonioni offers a life lesson
Opaque enough to require additional viewings to better comprehend its intricacies, but it does nothing to draw you back.
Some consider The Passenger a classic, which leads me to believe there are also people who enjoy waiting for trains that will probably never arrive.
Even when he threatens to fall into an abyss of navel-gazing, Antonioni never fails to offer up striking images.
A creator of lonely worlds, Mr. Antonioni painted one of his most vivid portraits of isolation with The Passenger.
In The Passenger, Jack Nicholson gives one of his finest performances as television journalist David Locke.
Remains, thirty years later, as rambling, flaccid, enigmatically brooding and ultimately tedious as it was back in 1975.
One of the clearest representations of the director's worldview, in which the epic landscapes and camera movements eerily mirror a character's inner life ... or lack of one.
Here is Nicholson's classic, post-Mitchum cool, but humanly exposed, providing the star punch in Antonioni's pensive dreamscapes.
A movie with which one can grow old, in the same sense that one can see great productions of Hamlet at 15 and 40 and 70 years of age, measuring the relative depth of one's experience of life and the world against its mature vision.
Antonioni's moviemaking panache and distinctive narrative rhythm rarely have seemed so enticing and satisfying.
Latest News for The Passenger
July 31, 2007:
Remembering Michelangelo Antonioni
Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who gave the world such influential films as L'Avventura, Blow-Up, and The Passenger, died Monday at the age of 94. More...
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