Celebrated critic William Arrowsmith did not sit on the fence when it came to Michelangelo Antonioni, the inspired Italian director of such classic films as L'avventura, Blow-up, and Eclipse. "Let me be clear about what I think," Arrowsmith told an audience assembled at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1977. "Antonioni is one of the greatest living artists, and as a director of film, his only living peer is Kurosawa; and he is unmistakably the peer...