Barrie Maxwell often has the skinny on upcoming DVD releases before anyone else, so he isn't totally useless. The power of Bresson's films can be very hard to articulate. I didn't think much of Pickpocket when I first experienced it and I could easily have dismissed it, or mocked it. Frankly, I don't feel that it is all that great, nowhere near as powerful as A Man Escaped, Mouchette, Au hasard Balthazar or L'argent. I think that it is because the protagonist is a pickpocket, which is an innocuous crime, though victims would disagree, but perhaps if he had been a hitman or crooked cop who finds redemption, I would find it more interesting. Like Melville, whom I also greatly admire, Bresson's style often infuriates as well as enthralls me and Pickpocket tends to bother me the most, though the montage is sublime.
The Passenger, can be a confounding experience, if one expects another "Jack Nicholson 70s classic" or chic critique of modern malaise from Antonioni. Even if one expects the standard chase-thriller, one will be disappointed. Like Bresson, Antonioni's films are hard to fully appreciate on the initial viewing and tend to haunt the memory, drawing one back at least once, where they start to take on another dimension, if one watches closely.
Maxwell has excellent taste - in mainstream 'Classical' American Cinema, and that's great, but if he is going to venture into European Cinema of the same vintage, then he ought to take as much care in writing as he does with everything else. There are plenty of clunky, flatly-lit, ego-vehicle Hollywood epics that he clearly loves that I could indignantly dismiss, but then I'd apparently "be in the minority" and God knows I don't want that.
