christopher-underwood I couldn't help thinking, during one of the rare quiet moments of this extravaganza, how wonderful it would have been if directors with the style, ability and panache of Fellini, could have made such a film about their own capital city. What an archive we would then have had to gaze upon in wonder as we do here, at Rome. Captivating from the start this visual and plot less but loving portrait takes us on a journey through the director's eyes. Although there is no plot and this is more documentary we do begin with fictionalised titbits from Fellini's childhood and his subsequent arrival in Rome. There are fantastic sequences that swirl around street diners and street furniture and traffic. Not perhaps how I would choose to eat but so convincingly Italian. The same with impressions of entertainment halls and brothels, not to forget the moving underground scenes, all shot so immaculately and with such stunning accompanying music. Towards the end Fellini allows himself a rather large poke at the Catholic church and the pope with an amazingly over the top ecclesiastical fashion show that even outdoes the works of our own Ken Russell. Fabulous and exciting with barely a pause for breath.

lasttimeisaw Fellini's ROMA imposingly alternates between two paralleled narratives in Rome, his salad days during the WWII and the beginning of 1970s, when he is an eminent filmmaker making a new film about the city, erratically charts its local customs and folk culture to pay homage to an ancient and great city. Structurally, the film doesn't stick to a linear one, instead it disguises with a pseudo-documentary style, in fact, most of the scenes were re-constructed in Cinecittà, however, Fellini stuns audience again with his majestic undertaking which significantly blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction.The film is not just an ode to the city, more prominently, it is the clashes between past and present that reverberate strongly today. His young self (played by Falcon), a doe-eyed townie arrives in Rome for college, enjoys a boisterous dinner in the street trattoria with the entire neighbourhood, watches a shoddy variety show with crude spectators which would be interrupted by an air raid, flirts with the brothel for the first time; when time leaps forward to the 1970s, the flower-child generation is consuming with alienation and torpidity, a poetic episode of the underground metro construction team encounters an undiscovered catacomb, where fresh air breaches into the isolated space and ruins all its frescoes in a jiffy. A superlative conceit encapsulates the dilemma between modern civilisation and ancient heritage.There is no absence of Fellini-esque extravaganza, the brothels during wartime are quintessentially embellished with crazed peculiarity and vulgarity for its zeitgeist and national spirit, where sex can be simply traded as commodity without any emotional investment. The most striking one, is the flamboyant fashion-show of church accouterments organised by Princess Domitilla (De Doses) for Cardinal Ottaviani (Giovannoli), consummated in an overblown resurrection of the deceased Pope, it is sacrilege in its most diverting form, only Fellini can shape it with such grand appeal and laugh about it.Two notable celebrity cameos, Gore Vidal, expresses his love of the city from an expatriate slant, and more poignant one is from Anna Magnani, her final screen presence - Ciao, buonanotte! - a sounding farewell for this fiery cinema icon. The epilogue, riding with a band of motorists, visiting landmarks in the night, Fellini's ROMA breezily captures this city's breath of life, sentimental to its distinguished history, meanwhile vivacious even farcical in celebrating its ever-progressing motions, a charming knockout!

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.

daniel Carbajo López Fellini's Rome is a very weird film: it has not a clear plot, in fact there isn't any main character but the great city of Rome. We can watch different people from different times living and enjoying Rome. As a movie without plot it could become absolutely boring and annoying, but the greatness of Fellini transforms it in a curious portrait of characters that go up and down in the city. It is clear that it is an exercise of exquisite quality in directing, the main problem is that it is difficult to the film to be more than that. Had the movie a worse director, it would have been one of the worst films ever made. Being directed by Fellini, it becomes a curios strange film. I have not liked it at all, but I have to admit that the directing is great.