La notte

Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece about urban alienation stars Italian film icons Marcello Mastroianni, Jeanne Moreau and Monica Vitti.

Marcello Mastroianni (La dolce vita, 8-1/2) and Jeanne Moreau (Jules et Jim) come together as a married couple living in crisis. He is a renowned author, she is “the wife”. Over the course of a day and the night into which it inevitably bleeds, they drift through Milan, reflecting on their relationship and encountering friends and strangers, including Vitti as a rich young heiress.

Photographed in rapturous black-and-white by the great Gianni di Venanzo, La Notte is one of the masterworks of 1960s cinema; a sprawling study of Italy’s upper middle-class and an x-ray of modern man’s psychic desolation.