Michelangelo Antonioni gallery

L'Avventura was Antonioni's international breakthrough, a classic study of an alienated Italian middle-class that made a star of the young Monica Vitti. Jeered by a startled audience at the 1960 Cannes film festival, it was later voted the second best movie ever made (after Citizen Kane, natch). Photograph: Public domain

Red Desert (1964) sends Monica Vitti on a confused, blasted odyssey through a modern industrial wilderness. It is arguably Antonioni's most bold and ambitious film; a peerless study of existential dread, pulsating with lurid colours. Photograph: Public domain

Blowup (1966), Antonioni's English-language debut, remains the archetypal Swinging 60s London thriller. David Hemmings is the modish photographer embroiled (possibly) in a murder plot, and yet nothing is quite as it seems in a film that taunts and teases the viewer. Significantly, Blowup climaxes with a mimed tennis match in which Hemming is lured into chasing after a lost "ball". Photograph: Public domain

Antonioni upped sticks to the US to shoot Zabriskie Point (1969), a classic late-60s timepiece. Its fevered, frewheeling plot is home to all manner of student radicals, angry loners and capitalist bread-heads. Reviled at the time, the film now has a fervent cult following. Photograph: Kobal

The Passenger (1975) cast Jack Nicholson as a TV reporter on the run, with Maria Schneider riding shotgun. Elegant and enigmatic, the film builds to a stunning seven-minute single take. Photograph: Kobal

After suffering a stroke in the mid-1980s, Antonioni made his grand return to cinema with Beyond the Clouds (1995), directing scenes from his wheelchair with the aid of fellow film-maker Wim Wenders. The result was a serious, stately meditation on the meaning of life ... and the beauty of naked women. Photograph: Public domain