[Fellini's Roma is] another quasi-documentary: of what the city meant to him as a provincial youth, how it seemed when he arrived, what it seems to him today.

Not a bad commission for a picture, and anyone who has never seen a Fellini film might be struck by the fertility and easy skill of this one. Unfortunately not many of us have the requisite ignorance of Fellini. We keep seeing remakes here of what he has done before. The scenes of youthful longing are varied only slightly from those in The Clowns, which even then were not as good as in I Vitelloni. The burst of outdoor communal eating in Rome is only a domesticated modern version of the feasts in Satyricon. Fellini's "typage" (Eisenstein's term)—the ability to select unusual faces that are self-explaining, that serve their functions without dossier—used to be a kind of wonderful...