Federico Fellini

The cognoscenti will recognize touches that have turned up in eight Fellini features that followed this one.

A funny, sardonic, and clever satire on popular heroes and ordinary people's illusions.

It shows all of Fellini's unrivaled virtues -- his lyrical sense of place, his abiding affection for even the most hapless of his characters, his effortless knack for limpid, bustling composition -- and very few of his putative vices.

La Strada is the first film that can be called entirely 'Felliniesque.'

The most obscure film of the highly visible Federico Fellini.

As artificial as Cabiria's behavior sometimes seems, it always seems her own, and this little woman carries herself proudly through the gutters of Rome.

An epic, breathtakingly stylish cinematic landmark, La Dolce Vita remains riveting in spite of -- or perhaps because of -- its sprawling length.

It has glamour, sophistication, color, wit and sensuality (not necessarily in that order), all of which blend very well in the enveloping air of a facility that is to be devoted to the showing of sophisticated films.

Inventive, thought-provoking, and funny, 8 1/2 represents the arguable peak of Federico Fellini's many towering feats of cinema.

It never less than dazzling to look at.

It offers pleasures above and beyond its status as a relic of a groovier and exponentially more swinging era.

It is so much more ambitious and audacious than most of what we see today that simply as a reckless gesture, it shames these timid times. Films like this are a reminder of how machine-made and limited recent product has become.

Fellini isn't just giving us a lot of flashy scenes, he's building a narrative that has a city for its protagonist instead of a single character.

Ribald, sweet, and sentimental, Amarcord is a larger-than-life journey through a seaside village and its colorful citizens.

Fellini's films often seem lazy, but this one looks plain tired.

It is no longer enough that Fellini deal with the ways women tantalize, dominate, and possess his male heroes. Now he must also deal with the women themselves. For Fellini, this is probably not nearly so much fun.

Obviously, it isn't the intellectual content that's meant to carry the picture, but even Fellini's elaborate visuals seem timid and uninspired this time around.

The film isn't a particularly pleasurable experience, but it does have a cranky, old-man's integrity.

It would not be of much interest, I imagine, to anyone who was not familiar with Fellini's earlier films.