"It will be a crying shame if the audience that will undoubtedly be attracted to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up because it has been denied a Production Code seal goes looking more for sensual titillation than for the good, solid substance it contains--and therefore will be distracted from recognizing the magnitude of its forest by paying attention to the comparatively few defoliated trees. This is a fascinating picture, which has something real to say about the matter of personal involvement and emotional commitment in a jazzed-up, media-hooked-in world so cluttered with synthetic stimulations that natural feelings are overwhelmed. It is vintage Antonioni fortified with a Hitchcock twist, and it is beautifully photographed in color." -- The New York Times

"What it sees becomes a far-out, uptight and vibrantly exciting picture...Antonioni presents for public inspection a slice of death: the same cold death of the heart his stories invariably describe. Yet in Blow-Up, Antonioni's anti-hero holds in his possession, if only for an instant, the alexin of his cure: the saving grace of the spirit...Blow-Up will have its detractors, and many of them will wonder why Antonioni offers no explicit explanation of what happens, why he arbitrarily transforms an ingenious thriller into an opaque parable. But the transformation is not really arbitrary, and the parable has a point. In the last scene, the riotous masquers of the opening reappear to play tennis with an invisible ball, and one of them hits it over the fence. Wonderingly, the photographer picks it up. Holding the invisible in his hand, he looks like a man who has glimpsed for the first time something of what St. Paul may have meant by 'the things which are not seen' - a man suddenly made aware that there is more to life than what the senses can perceive or the camera record. Deliberately, he throws the ball back onto the court. And the game goes on." -- Time magazine

"Writer-Director Antonioni's hypnotic pop culture parable of photographer caught in passive lifestyle. Arresting, provocative film, rich in color symbolism, many-layered meanings." -- Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide

"There may be some meaning, some commentary about life being a game, beyond what remains locked in the mind of film's creator, Italian director-writer Michelangelo Antonioni. But it is doubtful that the general public will get the 'message' of this film...As a commentary on a sordid, confused side of humanity in this modern age it's a bust." -- Variety

"It is possible that this year's contributions from Ford, Dreyer, Hitchcock, Chabrol, and Godard may cut deeper and live longer, but no other movie this year has done as much to preserve my faith in the future of the medium." - Andrew Sarris

"Will Blow-Up be taken seriously in 1968 only by the same sort of cultural diehards who are still sending out five-page single-spaced letters on their interpretation of Marienbad?...It probably won't blow over because it also has the Morgan!-Georgy Girl appeal; people identify with it so strongly, they get upset if you don't like it--as if you were rejecting not just the movie but them. And in a way they're right, because if you don't accept the peculiarly slugged consciousness of Blow-Up, you are rejecting something in them. Antonioni's new mixture of suspense with vagueness and confusion seems to have a kind of numbing fascination for them that they associate with art and intellectuality, and they are responding to it as their film--and hence as a masterpiece...Love-hate is what makes drama not only exciting but possible, and it certainly isn't necessary for Antonioni to resolve his conflicting feelings. But in Blow-Up he smothers this conflict in the kind of pompous platitudes the press loves to designate as proper to 'mature,' 'adult,' sober' art. Who the hell goes to movies for mature, adult, sober art, anyway?" - Pauline Kael

"Over three days recently, I revisited Blow-Up in a shot-by-shot analysis. Freed from the hype and fashion, it emerges as a great film, if not the one we thought we were seeing at the time...Antonioni uses the materials of a suspense thriller without the payoff. He places them within a London of heartless fashion photography, groupies, bored rock audiences, languid pot parties, and a hero whose dead soul is roused briefly by a challenge to his craftsmanship." - Roger Ebert

AWARDS AND HONORS

Blow-Up received Academy Award nominations for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Blow-Up received a Golden Globe nomination for Best English Language Foreign Film.

The film received three BAFTA Film Award nominations for Best British Art Direction (color), Best British Cinematography (color) and Best British Film.

Blow-Up won the Palme d'Or at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival.

The French Syndicate of Cinema Critics named Blow-Up the Best Foreign Film of the year.

The Italian National Syndicate of Film Journalists named Michelangelo Antonioni Best Foreign Director for Blow-Up.

Antonioni won Best Director from the Kansas City Film Critics Circle for Blow-Up.

The National Society of Film Critics named Blow-Up Best Film and Michelangelo Antonioni Best Director.

In 2009 director Wes Craven created a list for Entertainment Weekly magazine called "10 Movies That Shook Me Up." He included Blow-Up on the list saying, "I saw Antonioni's Blow-Up when it first came out, in a theater in Potsdam, N.Y., the small town where I was teaching at the time. Clarkson College, Department of Humanities. I went back to see it three times in the next week, fascinated by it. The oblique, non-linear, suggestive ambience, the incredible control of color (Antonioni painted whole streets to accord with his needs), the shocking (for that time) sexuality, and the impenetrable complexity of its mystery absolutely beguiled me. It wasn't long after seeing this film that I quit my job and headed off to New York to seek my fortune in the film business."

In 2012 Vanity Fair magazine named Blow-Up one of the "25 Most Fashionable Films of All Time," saying "It's not a whodunit; it's a what-happened...You could say the movie is about the culture of seeing versus the nature of seeing. And that's what fashion is all about."

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume