In the 1950s, Michelangelo Antonioni began to make features in the ’50s “that considered film’s capacity for visualizing interior states of mind,” writes L.A. Weekly contributor Robert Koehler about Il grido, which screens tonight and tomorrow at L.A.’s New Beverly cinema.

“As a tale of factory worker Aldo (American actor Steve Cochran), who has a breakup with his longtime lover Irma (Alida Valli) and leaves home with his young daughter to get a new grasp on life, the film cunningly borrows many neorealist tropes and then rattles them until they splinter.

“Viewers may at first think they’ve stumbled into a Vittorio De Sica movie involving struggling laborers and their cute kids, but the odyssey here proceeds not toward a final enlightenment or insight, but outward through vast, limitless landscapes that Antonioni brilliantly conceives as physical correlatives for Cochran’s state of mind.”