Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Anthropology student Daria, who's helping a property developer build a village in the Los Angeles desert, and dropout Mark, who's wanted by the authorities for allegedly killing a policeman during a student riot, accidentally encounter each other in Death Valley and soon begin an unrestrained romance.
Zabriskie Point is Antonioni's American fever dream — visually ravishing and deeply idiosyncratic. Haskell Wexler's cinematography is stunning, capturing the American desert landscape with an alien, hypnotic beauty that few films have matched. The ending explosion sequence, set to Pink Floyd, is one of cinema's most audacious and purely cinematic moments, earning its own category score. Novelty is high because this is a genuinely singular work — a European art-film gaze turned on American counterculture, resulting in something no American director could or would have made. However, the plot is thin and meandering, functioning more as a series of impressions than a narrative, and the non-professional leads deliver flat, stilted performances that even sympathetic viewers acknowledge as a weakness. The film's reputation is that of a beautiful, flawed curio — beloved for its images and ending rather than its storytelling or performances.