NOTE: The below Blu-ray and 4K UHD captures were taken directly from the respective disc.

ADDITION: Masters of Cinema 4K UHD (November 2025): Masters of Cinema have transferred Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte to 4K UHD. We reviewed two DVD (Fox Lorber / Eureka) and two Blu-rays (Masters of Cinema / Criterion) of Michelangelo Antonioni's "La Notte" in 2013 HERE.

The 4K UHD is nothing short of revelatory – a benchmark restoration that finally allows Antonioni’s black-and-white masterpiece to breathe in the full depth it has always demanded. Sourced from a 2024 4K scan supervised by Giuseppe Lanci and executed by the Cineteca Nazionale (working from a duplicate element because the camera negative was unavailable), the image is astonishingly clean yet faithfully filmic, retaining every grain of Gianni Di Venanzo (The 10th Victim, Le Amiche, Il Grido, L’Eclisse, Juliet of the Spirits,) originally captured while delivering razor-sharp resolution and previously unseen micro-detail in textures: the pebbled leather of coats, the reflective sheen of rain on Milanese streets, the almost tactile porosity of concrete façades. The new, exclusive Dolby Vision grade is masterful – not a gimmick but a genuine artistic enhancement that expands the tonal scale to an almost three-dimensional degree; whites are blindingly pure, blacks plunge into velvet abysses, and the infinite shades of grey in between possess a luminous, silvered quality that makes the film look freshly photographed yesterday. This is easily the finest La Notte has ever looked on home video and one of the most beautiful black-and-white 4K UHD presentations ever released. Di Venanzo, Antonioni’s most indispensable collaborator, understands that emptiness itself can be the subject of a film. The 2160P image is never merely beautiful; it is surgical. Milan’s postwar architecture - glass curtain walls, brutalist façades, endless grids of windows - is shot with a cold, crystalline sharpness that turns the city into a geometric proof of spiritual desolation. Reflections are everywhere: in skyscraper windows, rain-slicked streets, the mirrored surfaces of luxury apartments, so that characters are constantly duplicated, fragmented, or erased by their own environment. Antonioni and Di Venanzo favor extreme wide shots in which human figures are reduced to tiny, isolated marks on a vast white page. When they do move in closer, it is usually to frame faces in profile or three-quarter view against blank walls, or to trap them between foreground and background planes so that they appear pressed like specimens between slides. The camera rarely moves with urgency; it glides, tracks, or remains perfectly still, enforcing a contemplative, almost entomological gaze. It looked achingly beautiful on my system.

It is likely that the monitor you are seeing this review is not an HDR-compatible display (High Dynamic Range) or Dolby Vision, where each pixel can be assigned with a wider and notably granular range of color and light. Our capture software if simulating the HDR (in a uniform manner) for standard monitors. This should make it easier for us to review more 4K UHD titles in the future and give you a decent idea of its attributes on your system. So our captures may not support the exact same colors (coolness of skin tones, brighter or darker hues etc.) as the 4K system at your home. But the framing, detail, grain texture support etc. are, generally, not effected by this simulation representation.

NOTE: We have added 66 more large resolution 4K UHD captures (in lossless PNG format) for DVDBeaver Patrons HERE

On their Blu-ray and 4K UHD, Masters of Cinema use a linear PCM mono track (24-bit) in the original Italian language. The original uncompressed mono soundtrack (sourced from the surviving camera negative’s audio track) is presented with exemplary clarity and dynamic fidelity. Silences remain absolute, footsteps and distant city noises possess startling presence, and Giorgio Gaslini’s (Deep Red, So Sweet, So Dead, The Night of the Devils) sparse, haunted jazz score floats with an ethereal, almost ghostly detachment that perfectly serves Antonioni’s aesthetic of absence. Dialogue is crisp and perfectly centered, with no trace of distortion even in the storm sequences or the cavernous echoes of the Gadda villa. For a sixty-four-year-old Italian film, the track sounds immaculate – quiet when it must be devastatingly quiet, alive when it needs to intrude. Masters of Cinema offer optional English subtitles on their Region FREE 4K UHD.

Masters of Cinema 4K UHD limited edition is generously appointed without being bloated. Tony Rayns (King of the Children: And the New Chinese Cinema) delivers an outstanding new audio commentary – erudite, passionate, and rich with contextual insight into Antonioni’s formal strategies and the film’s place within postwar Italian culture. Richard Dyer’s (Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society) new 3/4 hour interview is superb, offering a deeply considered queer/theoretical reading of the film’s emotional and spatial dynamics. The archival interview with composer Giorgio Gaslini (not from 2020, as published - as he died in 2014) is fascinating for its discussion of how he approached scoring silence itself. The substantial booklet contains Brad Stevens’ (author of Abel Ferrara: The Moral Vision) excellent long-form essay and, most valuably, the complete transcript of Antonioni’s lengthy 1961 press conference about the film – a genuine historical treasure. Add the original Italian trailer and beautiful O-card packaging, and the supplementary package feels perfectly judged: scholarly yet accessible, substantial yet focused.

Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte is not merely the middle panel of Antonioni’s “alienation trilogy” - it is the most surgically precise, the most merciless, and, for many, the greatest of his works. Where L’Avventura still flirts with mystery and L’Eclisse leans toward apocalyptic abstraction, La Notte is pure emotional autopsy: twenty-four hours in the death throes of a marriage, observed with the cold clarity of a pathologist who has long since stopped believing in resurrection. The film opens with one of the most deliberate credit sequences in cinema: a slow, vertiginous descent down the Pirelli Tower, Milan’s gleaming new symbol of postwar prosperity. The camera glides past reflective glass, empty windows, and the distant, toy-like city below - a visual metaphor that announces the theme before a single word is spoken: modern man has built a world of surfaces that reflect everything except himself. Antonioni’s mastery of space reaches its apotheosis in the all-night party at the Gadda villa, a sequence that rivals The Great Gatsby or La dolce vita in its portrait of bourgeois decadence but without a trace of Fellini’s baroque exuberance. The party is shot in a cold, clinical style: rain-slicked terraces, jazz combos playing to indifferent guests, swimming pools reflecting fractured light. Bodies move through the frame like ghosts; conversations evaporate the moment they begin. When Lidia (Jeanne Moreau - Mademoiselle, Hi-Jack Highway, Eve, Bay of Angels, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Back to the Wall, The Bride Wore Black, Querelle, Seven Days... Seven Nights, Jules and Jim, Elevator to the Gallows, Les Amants, The Immortal Story) calls Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni - 8 1/2, The Organizer, City of Women, L'Assassino, Divorce Italian Style, The Skin, The Beekeeper, Adua and Her Friends, The 10th Victim, La Grande Bouffe, Casanova 70', A Special Day, Marriage Italian Style) from a phone booth in the storm, confessing she no longer loves him, the moment should be climactic, but Antonioni drains it of melodrama - Giovanni’s reaction is a stunned, almost polite “I know.” Monica Vitti’s (Red Desert, L’Avventura, L’Eclisse, Modesty Blaise) Valentina is the only character who still seems alive - radiantly intelligent, playfully erotic, almost cruelly awake - yet even her luminous presence ultimately collapses into the same void, leaving Giovanni’s hand empty after she erases her own recorded voice and walks away, proving that even the last flicker of spontaneity in this frozen world is doomed to self-extinction. La Notte remains another Antonioni’s masterpiece because it is the one film that refuses even the consolation of mystery: here, there is no vanished girl to search for, no eclipse to await. Only the present moment, unbearably prolonged, in which two human beings discover they have become strangers to themselves and to each other - and that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, to be done about it. Eureka’s Masters of Cinema 4K UHD of La Notte is not merely the definitive home-video edition of Antonioni’s greatest film – it is one of the finest releases of the entire 2020s home-video era. The restoration is exemplary, the Dolby Vision presentation transformative, the extras illuminating without excess, and the limited run of 2,000 copies with its handsome slipcase and booklet already feels like an instant collector’s item. If you care about cinema as art, this belongs in your collection without qualification or hesitation. Finally the first Antonioni film to reach 4K UHD and it is, of course, essential.

Gary Tooze