Tag Archives: Federico Fellini

The Godfather Trilogy

Adapting Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, Francis Ford Coppola drew up several themes lying dormant within its pages and augmented them in a uniquely cinematic fashion to create a masterful saga.

398. Rome, Open City

Rome Open City began filming as Auschwitz was liberated and Roberto Rossellini’s film marks a crucial step in the creation of art in the wake of the Holocaust.

396. L’Avventura

With this modernist masterpiece, Michelangelo Antonioni told a story that abandoned its initial plot. Booed at Cannes, it paved the way for a new cinematic form.

394. Amarcord

Like many Fellini films, Amarcord is a contradiction; an account of his youth yet a complete fabrication, a vivid realisation of the past, but also a dream.

370. Cinema Paradiso

Nostalgia originally had nothing to do with the past but rather a desire to return home. Cinema Paradiso resonates with the feeling that cinema is your home.

352. Roma

Alfonso Cuarón has long flirted with the neorealist style. His latest masterpiece, Roma illustrates cinema is not about what you show, but how you show it.

341. Edward Scissorhands

Ever wondered where snow comes from? That and other wonders – and horrors – live inside Tim Burton’s classic.

336. Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Films about writers are tricky propositions but you can roughly divide the genre into two eras; pre- and post-Mishima.

330. Aguirre, the Wrath of God

Werner Herzog’s hallucinatory telling of a Conquistador’s search for El Dorado etches a landscape of greed on the human face.

322. Yi Yi

As the title to Edward Yang’s masterpiece indicates, Yi Yi is a series of doubles; narrative, thematic, visual and aural, that deliver a subtle family portrait.

320. Cries and Whispers

Cries and Whispers was Ingmar Bergman’s fourth colour film but with a palette of just black, white and red, he still painted deep emotions and vivid dreams.

315. Letter from an Unknown Woman

Max Ophuls’ adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella is more than a romance; it explores memory, delusion and the meaning of art.

298. The Great Beauty

While Paolo Sorrentino’s film follows in the footsteps of Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, its quest arrives at a very surprising answer.

296. Un Chien Andalou

This film lasts seventeen minutes, features mutilation, insects and dismemberment. Yet it is one of the most influential ever made.

282. The Leopard

All countries have troubled histories they would rather forget. The Leopard is a masterpiece that admits to those troubles as well as the failure to fix them.

278. The Rules of the Game

Reviled and banned upon its release, then feared lost forever, Jean Renoir’s masterpiece stands today as a victory for liberalism.

274. Day for Night

Francois Truffaut created the auteur theory, and with Day for Night he delivered a tribute to the art form without which he felt his life could not make sense.

272. 8 1/2

Fellini’s masterpiece is often described as a film about not being able to make a film. But really it is about responsibility, liability, lying, loving and living.

264. if….

Despite being labelled fascist and an insult to Britain, if… won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1969. Almost half a century later, it still retains much of its power.

246. Dreams

If the dream sequence is a crutch for many dull thrillers, horrors and mysteries, what makes a good one? One that challenges and stretches cinematic language.

243. Great Sounds – Part Two

The world is so noisy, we unconsciously filter out all that we don’t want to hear. Much of film sound operates in the same way.

239. Three Colors

Is Krzysztof Kieslowski’s trilogy only about liberty, equality and fraternity? Look again and you’ll find it also addresses fate, coincidence and co-existence.

232. The Age of Innocence

Best known for his crime dramas, Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s romantic novel is one of his most incisive works.

210. Adaptation.

If writers are told to write from experience, is Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book not really Kaufman’s autobiography?

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