Here's your chance to see a cinematic classic for free! The Loft's Essential Cinema program continues with L'Avventura at 7 p.m. tonight. You can find the details here.

Here's the Loft's description of the film:

One of modern cinema’s trailblazing works, and often cited as one of the greatest films ever made, L’Avventura is a gorgeously shot tale of modern ennui and spiritual isolation, wrapped inside a tantalizingly ambiguous mystery involving a young woman’s disappearance during a yachting trip off the coast of Sicily.

Legendary Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s (Blow-Up, The Passenger) controversial international sensation was initially booed but ultimately fêted at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival, winning a Special Jury Prize for its beauty and “for seeking to create a new film language.” Antonioni’s “adventure,” co-written with Tonino Guerra, has a yachting party of wealthy Italians landing on a deserted volcanic island, where Anna (Lea Massari) disappears after quarreling with her fiancé Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti). Sandro and Anna’s friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) then spend the rest of the film looking for her — and falling in love with each other. Or are they merely in love with the idea of being in love? And what has become of poor Anna? Antonioni departed from conventional plot, narrative, and resolution in favor of a new, reflective aesthetic that uses cinematic time and space to explore psychology and metaphysics. L’Avventura demonstrates his great mastery of composition, long-take sequence shots, and real time; his linkage of his characters to architecture and landscape; his unusual use of absence and irresolution. All is put to startling, unsettling effect: L’Avventura expressed “the great emotional sickness” of the modern era — spiritual malaise; a society adrift; men and women unable to communicate — like no film had before it. Mysterious, allusive and audacious in both its visual and narrative design, Antonioni’s provocative look at love gone wrong stands as one of the most influential and radical films of the 1960s.