PodBill Just what I expected

Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Janis One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

hou-3 I am a great fan of early Fellini, and as late as Amarcord I still find much to admire. After that, though, there seems to me to be an inexorable decline in originality. By the time we get to this film the decline is definitely in evidence throughout. Freshness has given way to trademark, vitality to predictability. Mastroianni is still there, as cool and enigmatic as ever, and some of the cinematography remains dazzling. But an air of staleness hangs over the whole film, which apart from its other defects is far too long. Fellini fanatics admire it, that much is obvious, and good luck to them. But most simple admirers will pass it by. It is worth adding that in the troubled and deeply unequal world we live in, Fellini's later obsession with the idle rich is looking increasingly frivolous. But maybe that's just me.

Phillim Big dream/nightmare vision of a man in late middle age (dapper hot daddy Marcello Mastroianni) about women, gender politics, and death.Midway through 'City of Women' we are introduced to one Dr. Katzone (literally 'Dr. Big-Dick'), representing the phallocratic, pig-man archetype. He drinks, he bullies, he shoots guns, he objectifies women. He lives in a castle comprising an assemblage of phallic symbols, wherein he has built a giant gallery/pantheon, where framed sexy pictures of his hundreds of 'conquests' light up and speak sexy talk when you push their respective buttons.Fellini cast tough-guy actor Ettore Manni as 'Dr. Big-Dick' -- reportedly to type: the character merely a slight exaggeration of the blustery actor. The Legend: the hyper-masculine Manni was in the habit of tucking a pistol in his pants. During the film shoot, Manni accidentally shot his genitals off and bled to death. Absolutely true? I like to believe it.Anyway, this is a helluva film -- hilarious, surreal, honest. Art director Giorgio Giovaninni deserves many medals.

alidoro Probably there is no Fellini's film, after Amarcord (1973), with such a high level of mastery as "Otto e mezzo", "La Dulce Vita", and Amarcord. But there are certainly strokes of genius in "E la nave VA", the nostalgic and highly critical of TV "Ginger and Fred", the delightfully autobiographical "Intervista" or even the "lunatic" and "moonstruck" "La voice Della Luna". "La cittá Dell Donne"has few assets to remember: Mastroianni, of course, and some brilliant scenes where the world of Snaporaz's erotics fantasies is brought back as a sort of entertainment show. But the script is faulty, there is no "reality check" to confront such unbridled fancy, where everything is possible. Of course, Fellini is a master, and "La cittá Dell Donne" is still the work of a master, who revisits one of his obsessions: women and sex and eroticism. But the same subject has been (much better) treated in "La Dulce vita", "Otto e mezzo", "Roma", "Amarcord", "Intervista" and even in "La Voce Della Luna".

MartinHafer The idea for this film is amusing. A man is dreaming or in a dream-like world run by angry ultra-ultra-ultra feminists who naturally scare him BUT at the same time, he tries to infiltrate their ranks because he is strongly aroused by one of these women--a lady he met and ALMOST had sex with on a train. Again and again, he tries in vain to find her but must contend with angry women who spout dogma like it's an indoctrination camp. This, combined with the obvious Freudian phallic imagery is used to create a man's worst nightmare--women who don't want him and who laugh at his virility! It's all an Absurdist-Surrealist experiment that just doesn't hold up for long--especially because the movie seems to last an eternity. As a result, the original momentum is lost and odd but not especially interesting characters are introduced (such as the stud who is about to have his 10,000th conquest). About the only thing I DID like about the latter portion of the film was the nightmarish amusement park atmosphere towards the end--seeing Marcello Mastroianni sliding down a seemingly endless slide as he passed midway events was pretty amazing from a technical point of view.Overall, it's a one joke film that probably would have been better as a short. I know that the "Fellini-heads" out there think everything he did was pure genius, but this one just left me cold after a while. Perhaps I am just a plebe, but this and his other mondo-bizarro films like SATYRICON are bizarre and overdone.