MamaGravity good back-story, and good acting

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

felixoteiza It's hard for me to render an objective verdict on Fellini Roma because, while being a rather unbalanced film--containing some trite stuff along with cinematographic gold--it also includes three episodes that fascinate me. The first one directly involves something I love, that's the journey of the film crew along the tunnel of the subway in construction. There is something surreal about that segment, something that gives it an out-of-this-world quality, while still belonging to our day to day, trivial reality. In my I Vitelloni review I said that Fellini had the capacity of making classics out of the most ordinary situations and this scene proves it. Because there's nothing in such episode that doesn't belong to our everyday reality, yet the feeling is that of a magical journey, something out of a fable. For ex., when the engineer orders to activate the cutter, what comes next doesn't look like a simple mechanical procedure, the drilling of a rock, but as it he had awakened instead a prehistoric monster, a dragon who was sleeping in the depths of the Earth and who starts suddenly breathing, slowly raising on its hinged legs over the men, thrusting its Alien-like jaws towards them. Here's is where Fellini's cinematographic genius appears at its best, as scenes like that one we may have seen many times in the news in TV, in civil engineering films, yet here the thing becomes surreal, straddles the realm of the fantastic. And all those effects, the eerie atmosphere, have been achieved simply with camera angles, lightning, the hovering dust, and the fact that all we hear is the life-like roar of the cutter. But he goes even further, he flirts also with the esoteric: even before the crew gets into the 2000-year Roman house, we viewers see what it's inside. Amazingly enough, one of the frescoes contains the uncannily accurate portrait of one of the crew members, who starts at that very moment feeling sick. Coincidence? Point for reincarnation? Lots to ponder there.The second episode I loved is that of the chaos in the highway, specially the night scenes. Compare the incredible vivacity of it, the joyous exuberance, the pulsating life of the city in the midst of the mass of intermingled cars, trucks; in the cacophony of innumerable horns; in all the dirty gestures, smirks, stares flying from car to car and back; in the stoic, angry, perplexed expressions in mirrors, windows, windshields--all that while the camera boom goes up and down, right and left--compare this magnificent chaos with the dead--fish opening of 8½. No way: on one hand we got a Fellini in full possession of his means, at the peak of his artistic creativity; on the other, an spiritually dead, practically sterile Fellini.The third episode I love here is the Vatican fashion show. As I've said about Buñuel, fans of Fellini tend to sell him short when it comes to social, political or religious commentary. True, they may be thinking they are just throwing jabs but, as irrepressible artists they are, the end result has always had a much greater reach. Think of Cervantes, who all what he wanted was to ridicule the Harry Potters of his day and who ended up penning instead the greatest literary work in History. That's how I see works where Buñuel or Fellini seem just being mean to the Church, the elites: they just can't help going far beyond that, reach new levels. Being neutral in the subject I find a subversive beauty in this scene, even if taken as mockery--not to mention the fact that there's nothing that excludes that the Church actually does some kind of exhibition when studying new trappings for its members. But the beauty of that scene, at least for me, it's in that it escapes the purely derisory and becomes--once again--a surreal experience, to which contributes much the haunting Rota score. The only thing I didn't get was the arrival of the old man with glasses who brings the house down, so to speak. "Our Pope is back!". What was the meaning of that, the Second Coming, a return to happier times?.Oh, the movie itself is a itinerary through time of the historic Rome from the 1930s to 1972, all seen through Fellini's eyes and life experience, yet you are never allowed to forget that this is a city thousands of years old. From the initial shot of a stone road sign, to a school principal talking to students about Cesar and crossing the Rubicon himself; to the movies in the matinée; to the ruins of buildings & monuments that liter the landscape, we are being constantly reminded that this isn't just a city that has lived through History but one that also contains History, one that's History itself, the cradle of our Western civilization nothing less. And this is Fellini's homage to it.Fellini Roma has no plot to properly speak of, just vignettes through time & place; the lives of Romans under Fascism, during war—including the ways they used to have a good time: communal diners, Variety shows, movie matinées--up to present day 1972, with the problems usual to urban sprawl: pollution, subway construction, hippies and other assorted malcontents. Fellini's cinematography is there and so his weird looking people with their odd behavior. In all it makes for an entertaining film, except for the bordello scenes, which I found rather long and tedious. I give it a 7.5/10 but I'll add 0.5 just because I loved that underground scene—what can I do, it's that personal background kicking again.

goldgreen The first half an hour of Roma is as good as anything that Fellini has made. Not following any real discernible plot, these 30 minutes largely show the thrill of a sprawling, wild lower middle class house that a young man (Fellini?) comes to stay at in Rome in the late 1930s. The scene where all the families in the apartments come out to eat pasta and snails(!) in the open air at night is thrilling for its use of stream of consciousness switch from one conversation to another - portraying the dynamism and the cheeky irreverence of Roman street life. This is film making at its best. Thereafter we switch to 1970s Rome and the mood becomes bleak. A long sequence of cars in a traffic jam in the rain with the conversations now all separate as people sit secluded away from each other. This appears to be a bleak comment on how Roman life has lost its zest. There are more switches of mood and scene all with no clear link other than they are based in Rome. Its all a bit confusing, but the first 30 minutes make it worth it. Woody Allen was clearly watching as there are many references here used in his films.

dromasca This is not a fiction movie. it needs to be seen with a different perspective. This is a movie about a city, one of the most beautiful and fascinating cities in the world. Fellini describes here the city, his feelings about it, his memories, the history and the people who live in it. One needs to look at this film like looking at a painting of an old master, not like at a fiction film. Then what is exposed to the viewer is a the full world of characters, some of them appearing on screen for a few seconds but stay in memory forever. It is the landscape of today, the memories and the history, the history that when touched by the air of the present melts under our own eyes as it happens in the fabulous underground scene. From the many films of Fellini this is one of the most personal, and a touching one. I loved it.

Graham Greene It's well known that Fellini abandoned linear, narrative film-making sometime during 8½, though perhaps the seeds were already being sewn with his two episodic dramas, Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita. Like those films, Fellini-Roma offers up a similarly episodic, shambolic and deeply romanticised depiction of Italy's capital. However, unlike those films, there is no central figure or narrator, like the prostitute Cabiria or Marcello the playboy journalist, to guide us through Fellini's labyrinthine concoction; only the fevered musings of it's director and the rambling recollections of a series of fanciful weirdoes. Thus, the film isn't a film in the traditional sense, but rather, a fusion of documentary style-footage and stylised recreations of characters, places, times and events.Many have criticised the film (as well as others from the same era, particularly Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Fellini-Casanova and The City of Women) as being trivial, meandering and self-indulgent, all of which are true, but certainly the element of indulgence and theatrical abstraction (as well as a penchant for the outrageous and arcane) was always part of Fellini's appeal. Here, the previous hints of free-form abstraction, is taken further, with all semblance of story removed, so the film, unlike his previous two films Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon, which were abstract and sprawling but still had a sense of character and plot, Roma instead, wanders along from one scene to the next, with no real focus on character (although there are many faces that reoccur throughout) and nothing in the way of narrative momentum. Now, this will undoubtedly be a problem for some viewers who require a sense of pace or meaning to their films, though, for those of us still interested in what Fellini has to offer, regardless of content (or lack, thereof), it is perhaps best to think of the film as a collection of scenes to dip in and out of at random.As was the case with many later-Fellini, the film has a number of intoxicating set pieces scattered sporadically throughout, amongst the most impressive being an epic fashion show replete with the trademark Fellini grotesques, social and political commentaries and a fair bit of sniping, sycophantic star-worship. Other standouts, with the film traversing a number of different time periods, include a reconstruction of Rome during the reign of Mussolini, a heated traffic jam on the autostrada and a lengthy documentary-like scene following a group of archaeologists searching through Rome's labyrinth of subway systems. There are a variety of other set pieces scattered throughout the film that probably warrant some sort of mention, but they just didn't resonate with me as highly as they have with certain other viewers.However, that's one of the great things about Fellini-Roma, with the director stringing together a series of impressionist sketches that will no doubt conjure different moods and emotions in whoever watches the film. As was apparent right from the start with Fellini, was his ability to evoke a certain time and place through his images, set-construction, sound-design, and overall iconography... and that's certainly evident here. Of course, like all of the director's work from this period, the film won't be to all tastes, with many no doubt despairing of the filmmaker's seeming indulgence, pretension and wanton disregard of character and narrative. However, if you treat the film more like an episodic tapestry (or travelogue) to dip in and out of, then you're sure to get a lot out of Fellini's majestic, carefully orchestrated imagery, bizarre cavalcade of clowns, freaks, geeks and weirdoes (not to mention the usual barrage of buxom ladies), and a collection of cameos and in-jokes from a variety of Fellini regulars.For my money, this film isn't quite as essential as 8 ½, Amarcord, La Dolce Vita or ...And the Ship Sails on, though it does rank alongside the sentimental La Strada and the similarly episodic Night of Cabiria (I'm not sure whether or not I prefer Casanova over this... I'd have to see both films again) and is much better than the free-form bombardment of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon and The City of Women (in my opinion, at least). Regardless of the comparisons to his previous films, Fellini-Roma is still an enchanting film with some astounding moments of visual spectacle to compensate for the overall lack of plot. Probably a worthwhile purchase for die-hard Fellini fans, though those new to the director's work would be better off starting elsewhere.