La Notte (Criterion Collection)

This psychologically acute, visually striking modernist work was director Michelangelo Antonioni’s follow-up to the epochal L’avventura. Marcello Mastroianni (Divorce Italian Style) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules and Jim) star as a novelist and his frustrated wife who, over the course of one night, confront their alienation from each other and the achingly empty bourgeois Milan circles in which they travel. Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti (Red Desert) smolders as an industrialist’s tempting daughter. Moodily sensual cinematography and subtly expressive performances make LA NOTTE an indelible illustration of romantic and social deterioration.