8 1/2

Director: Federico Fellini (1963), Cast: Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée, Claudia Cardinale, Academy Award Winner Best Foreign Language Film, NR, subtitled

One of the greatest films ever made, Federico Fellini’s 8½ marks the moment when the director’s always-personal approach to filmmaking fully embraced self-reflexivity, pioneering a stream-of-consciousness style that darts exuberantly among flashbacks, dream sequences, and carnivalesque reality, and turning one man’s artistic crisis into a grand epic of the cinema. Marcello Mastroianni plays Guido Anselmi, a director whose new project is collapsing around him, along with his life, as he struggles against creative block and helplessly juggles the women in his life. An early working title for 8½ was The Beautiful Confusion, and Fellini’s masterpiece is exactly that: a shimmering dream, a circus, and a magic act. “I cannot remember a more brilliant film.” —The New Republic