Mastroianni is at once suave and weary as Guido, a man who feels the sad, exhausting truth of middle age while still suffering from an childish sense of entitlement and indecision. On top of it all, he fears that his creativity is running thin and that his new film is little more than disconnected ideas.Ĭriticwire Classic of the Week: Carol Reed’s ‘The Third Man’ He shifts back and forth between reality, fantasies of idealized women, and his past misdeeds. Marcello Mastroianni stars in perhaps his definitive role as Guido Anselmi, an acclaimed Italian director who tries to rest at a spa while juggling his anxieties about his his marital and extramarital woes, his difficult and demanding relationships with his producer, writer and cast, his past, and his upcoming film. That shift was cemented with his next film (and probably the only serious challenger to “La Dolce Vita’s” top spot), “8 1/2.” One of the best films ever made about filmmaking, it’s simultaneously critical of its director’s self-importance and childishness and celebratory of the possibilities of the medium. This is the Criticwireįederico Fellini’s shift from heavily neorealist-influenced dramas to the more idiosyncratic, carnivalesque films that defined his work began in 1960 with “La Dolce Vita,” still arguably his greatest and most influential film.
Every now and then on the Criticwire Network an older film gets
