Somewhat overvalued as a critic, Pauline Kael famously once dismissed the work of Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni as "Antoniennui". It is fortunate then that it's Kael who has retired and not the man himself, who excitingly returns to the big screen later this year with Beyond The Clouds, made in collaboration with Wim Wenders, thus bestowing some much needed credibility on the German's beleaguered career. A good time too to revive his masterpiece, the cause celebre of Cannes 1960, which established his name on the international stage.

Anna (Lea Massasri) joins her friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her lover Sandro (Gabriele Feretti) on a cruising party around the north-east coast of Sicily. There are tensions between Sandro, a careworn architect who has sold his talent for success rather than fulfilment, and the diplomat's daughter after a month apart, and her insistence that she wants to be both with him and alone. Then she vanishes.

The yacht's crew search the island but find no trace. Nor can the police swiftly drafted in with helicopters and divers. Eventually the searchers have to leave, but Claudia determines not to give up and begins a quest up and down the coast. Eventually she is joined by Sandro and the two become lovers.

Aside from the meagre action of the opening half-hour (compared by some to Psycho, no less), L'Avventura is a film about almost nothing. Antonioni was ever a director to divide audiences with his cinema of shifting, allusive, almost ephemeral narrative. Don't come here looking for a mystery: Anna is never found. What happens succumbs to how it happens; if most cinema is about nouns and, especially, verbs, Antonioni was the precursor of the cinema of adjective.

Thus his camera eschews recording what it sees and becomes a microscope. Tiny events are suddenly magnified to the status of earthquakes within those it observes. When Sandro contrives to knock a bottle of ink over a young man's architectural drawing, the film surges with a quiet but unquenchable electricity. The searching lovers accidentally ringing the bell atop a convent has a chaotic feel.

The veteran director has always favoured long, languorous takes that speak as much about landscape as character. The people in this film are real and live for the viewer with depth and subtlety, but the places they visit are equally as alive. Deserted villages bleached in scorching sunshine or seemingly populated exclusively by lecherous men; the partying richists who bring to mind nothing so much as the mannequin sterility of Renais' L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad (1961). In the end, for all the film remains steadfastly rooted in time and place, it seems to step gradually outside of actuality and into an isolated magic realism that orbits around the glamorous Vitti and the cool, besuited Feretti. The future they are moving towards is as dislocated and suffocating as the present. (Maybe Spielberg and Cronenberg were mistaken and Antonioni was really the film-maker equipped to put J.G. Ballard on film?)

Antonioni has made films that were better seen (Blow-Up) and had bigger stars (a fascinating Jack Nicholson in The Passenger), but has never again made a film as haunting or as unique as this.