Federico Fellini
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Jay Kelly (2025)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by 8½ (1963), La Dolce Vita (1960)
Themes Visuals
The closest comparison to Jay Kelly I could think of is the more anarchic films of Federico Fellini, such as La Dolce Vita and 8 ½, where the Italian director started to wrestle with his own success.
Never does the material reach the heights of truly great films about this kind of world and its crossroads, such as “The Great Beauty” or “La Dolce Vita.”
In the light of a Tuscan summer, he looks like Marcello Mastroianni if Federico Fellini had shot 8½ in color.
The shadow of “8½” looms large over Noah Baumbach’s tale of an actor looking back at his life and regretting choices he’s made, but “Jay Kelly” has little of the resonance and imagination of Fellini’s masterpiece.
In a way, this is Clooney’s 8½.
The flashbacks call to mind Bob Fosse’s self-critiques in All That Jazz, or Federico Fellini analyzing his own romantic buffoonery and artistic impotence in 8½.
The Great Beauty (2013)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963), Amarcord (1973), Roma (1972)
Themes
The Italian title for Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is La Grande Bellezza, which much more closely evokes its main source of inspiration: the wondrous Federico Fellini opus La Dolce Vita.
Federico Fellini is an obvious touch point here: Sorrentino nods to both the corrosive hedonism of La Dolce Vita and the emotional paralysis of 8½, but his sensuous images outdo even the master’s.
This is Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), narrator and subject of The Great Beauty , who knows too well that he’s been living in a reminiscence of La Dolce Vita and seems to have accepted it with wry but weary resignation.
In blatant reference to La dolce vita, The Great Beauty is an apt if lazily postmodern response to Fellini’s question: how can we convert nihilism from an existential plague into a decent way of life?
The story of Jep’s plush detachment from the real world, and the crisis of soul he’d have if he could be certain he had a soul, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty is an utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty that evokes Fellini’s La Dolce Vita by way of Baz Luhrmann.
Writer/director Paolo Sorrentino's ("Il Divo," "This Must Be the Place") latest has been described as an homage to "La Dolce Vita," but this film is more ambitious, the filmmaker not only preserving a cultural moment in time as experienced by a bon vivant journalist, but expressing the man's interior thoughts cinematically, a jaded man's ability to still experience the glories of life amidst a social circle defined by its depraved snobbery, ostentation and gossip.
Mastroainni is such a mischievous screen presence, one need only take a brief look at Daniel Day-Lewis (inarguably a better actor who happens to be all wrong for the role) as Guido in the recent woebegotten musical adaptation Nine to see what a vapid pit of angsty self-pity into which this all could have descended.
The director in Federico Fellini’s autobiographical film masterpiece 8½ (1963), the basis for Nine, was more likable.
Nine is a cinematic adaptation of a 1982 Broadway musical, which was itself an adaptation of Federico Fellini’s playful, self-reflexive and semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½.
“Nine” is a disastrously misguided re-imagining of the Italian director’s legendary film “8½” in which all the thoughtful and interesting parts have been amputated and replaced with Broadway cheese and Hollywood superficiality.
Adapted from the 1982 Tony-winning Broadway play (book by Arthur L. Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston), which, in turn, was inspired by Federico Fellini's 1963 Oscar-winning masterpiece "8½," "Nine" combines a dream cast with a dreamy script and score for a thoughtful and enjoyable musical about art, life and love.
Remaking Federico Fellini's epochal 1963 masterwork 8½ is not at all as heinous as it sounds: indeed, if we were to start listing films clearly influenced by Fellini's massively self-reflective pseudo-autobiographical movie about an Italian film director who can't come up with an idea for his next project, we'd even stumble across some near-masterpieces.
Babylon (2022)
Directed by Damien Chazelle
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960), Satyricon (1969)
Themes Visuals
There are whiffs of “La Dolce Vita,” which Chazelle’s film evokes through its manufactured glamour and melancholy sex appeal, and also “The Wolf of Wall Street,” which “Babylon” channels throughout its go-for-broke first hour (while also borrowing half of its cast).
"Babylon" nods to celluloid classics – from “Singin’ in the Rain” to “A Star Is Born” to “La Dolce Vita.”
Chazelle takes heavy inspiration from Singin’ in the Rain , La Dolce Vita , Boogie Nights , and The Wolf of Wall Street , going as far as entirely recreating scenes with a contemporary, dirty twist.
Chazelle has said that he studied a number of movies in this paean to cinema—the production notes list examples as disparate as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960), and Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood (2007).
A cross between “Fellini Satyricon” and “There Will Be Blood” (with glamour and sound stages substituted for petroleum and oil derricks), “Babylon” is a licentious valentine to moviemaking in the ′20s and ′30s.
In structuring the picture around the reminiscences of Salvador Mallo (Antonio Banderas), who worries that he may never shoot another movie, Almodóvar invites us to consider Pain and Glory as his own version of Fellini’s 8½ .
Like Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s 8½ , Banderas’s Salvador Mallo is an autofictional director in crisis.
In this sense, the movie I thought about most while watching Pain and Glory, even more than 8½ —an obvious reference underlined by the poster of Fellini’s film hanging in the office of Salvador’s personal assistant—was Nanni Moretti’s masterful Mia madre.
The filmmaker in Fellini’s “8½” (1963) was professionally thwarted, too, but his problem was mental blockage and carnal fatigue, whereas poor Salvador has fused vertebrae (surely a better excuse).
It is more than Pedro Almodovar’s 8½ …it’s his Pain and Glory .
Rather than incorporating the melodrama many of his most polarizing films have featured, this comparatively low-brow story, rich with bittersweet humor and heart, seems only interested in honoring its form; similar to Federico Fellini’s own filmmaker chronicle 8½ (1963).
Luca (2021)
Directed by Enrico Casarosa
influenced by La Strada (1954), La Dolce Vita (1960), I Vitelloni (1953), Amarcord (1973), 8½ (1963)
Visuals Themes
But it also recalls the classic Italian films of Federico Fellini and others ( La Strada is a big influence), clear inspirations for Luca ‘s shimmering sophistication.
Luca is if Casarosa attempted a combination of Fellini’s La Strada with Miyazaki’s Kiki’s Delivery Service .
That draws them to the nearby town of Portorosso (the name seems a nod to the great and most European of the Studio Ghibli canon, “Porco Rosso”), a quintessential Italian hamlet with a village fountain and a “La Strada” poster on the wall.
A few other cinematic signposts pop up: A boat early on sports the name “Gelsomina,” Giulietta Masina’s character in La Strada —arguably one of the greatest Italian films of all time.
“Luca” is a bit colorless until the two boys arrive in the sloping fishing village of Portorosso, with its crooked pastel buildings and winding streets, its sun-dappled town square dotted with a trattoria and a pescheria, its poster of “La Strada.”
Luca might be the first kids film to name-drop La Strada’s Gelsomina, which is a win for Fellini diehards but a head-scratcher overall given her fate.
The Hand of God (2021)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963)
Themes Visuals
If The Great Beauty was Paolo Sorrentino’s extravagant homage to La Dolce Vita — with nods also to 8½ and Roma — The Hand of God is the Italian Oscar winner’s Amarcord .
At first, The Hand of God seems like an echo of the lusty nostalgia of Fellini’s Amarcord , just as The Great Beauty was his attempt to bring La Dolce Vita into Rome of the 21st century.
The Great Beauty was dismissed by some as essentially a remake of La Dolce Vita (which was, after all, its point); but this coming-of-age reminiscence is effectively Sorrentino’s personal blend of Amarcord and I Vitelloni .
Sorrentino has often courted comparison to Fellini, with 2013’s The Great Beauty (read review) playfully imbued with the energy of an 8½ (1963) or La Dolce Vita (1960).
The person who sensed that attraction most keenly, of course, was Fellini, and that is why “The Hand of God” wrestles with his legacy; Marchino auditions for a Fellini production, surrounded by exotic hopefuls, and the sight of a huge chandelier, its blaze undimmed, lying aslant on the floor of a half-deserted house would have suited “La Dolce Vita” (1960).
For Sorrentino, whose surreal flourishes, particularly the “La Dolce Vita”-esque “The Great Beauty,” have drawn Fellini comparisons, this is his “Amarcord.”
Under the Tuscan Sun (2003)
Directed by Audrey Wells
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960), Nights of Cabiria (1957)
Visuals Characters
This is not Tennessee Williams' "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" or Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" (although one of the most famous scenes from that film is restaged here).
Wells assumes the audience’s ignorance of all things Italian, and as such any scene with Lindsay Duncan’s Katherine (an American with delusions of Anita Ekberg) engaging La Dolce Vita or Nights of Cabiria feels more condescending than helpful.
But there's also Lindsay Duncan as Katherine, an eccentric 50-ish Englishwoman who has, unluckily for the locals, transplanted herself to Italy, where she swans about in apish imitation of Anita Ekberg in "La Dolce Vita."
This culminates in a well-done homage to the Trevi Fountain scene from Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" that is striking.
Wells assumes the audience’s ignorance of all things Italian, and as such any scene with Lindsay Duncan’s Katherine (an American with delusions of Anita Ekberg) engaging La Dolce Vita or Nights of Cabiria feels more condescending than helpful.
If they ever decided to spin a weekly television series off of Federico Fellini's ''Amarcord,'' Giuseppe Tornatore, the Italian director of ''Cinema Paradiso'' and the new Malena, would be an ideal choice for executive producer.
Malena begins as a lighthearted drama that recalls one of Federico Fellini's best-known works, Amarcord.
Giuseppe Tornatore ( Cinema Paradiso ) adapted his new film Malèna from a story by Luciano Vincenzoni ( The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly ), yet the whole thing comes off like a loud and humorless ripoff of Federico Fellini's Amarcord .
The Trip to Italy (2014)
Directed by Michael Winterbottom
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960)
Themes Visuals
La bella Italia, La Dolce Vita – it’s all on display in this glorious Grand Tour, full of good friends and good food and, most of all, full of laughter.
Brydon of course has his Godfather ’s, Coogan waxes fondly about Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (with the always hounded celeb reminding us that it’s the film where the term “paparazzi” was created), and then there is Coogan’s personal assistant Emme (Claire Keelan) who continuously references Roman Holiday , the ultimate Italian fantasy film for women as The Godfather is to men.
Among the many made-in-Italy films referenced in this movie (including William Wyler’s “Roman Holiday” and Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”), the most pertinent is John Huston’s “Beat the Devil” – another lunatic comedy improvised on the go.
The scenes of driving in Rome invite chat about La Dolce Vita and Roman Holiday.
But about two-thirds of the way through, someone notes that some people think La Dolce Vita is a celebration of Italian jet-set living, when actually, it's a scathing criticism of its ultimate emptiness.
To Rome with Love (2012)
Directed by Woody Allen
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960)
Themes Visuals Characters
The film’s Italian-language segments play like vague retreads of Fellini (one of Allen’s favourite directors) – the paparazzi swarming Benigni’s character are straight out of “La Dolce Vita”, while the country couple led astray by big-city temptation is a nod to the Italian director’s first film, “The White Sheik” – only without the wit, lyricism and undercurrent of despair.
The four disconnected stories in the film seem at moments to nod to the Italian New Wave (if more to Fellini's popular La Dolce Vita than to Antonioni's internal L'Avventura), but never in a way that feels particularly thought through.
Alec Baldwin's advice-giving phantom recalls Bogie in Allen's "Play It Again, Sam"; Penélope Cruz's kooky hooker resembles characters in "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and "Mighty Aphrodite"; and Benigni's everyman stalked by paparazzi is a shoutout to Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
"Paparazzi" is an Italian word derived from a photographer's name in Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita."
Now, in To Rome with Love, he naturally highlights the Colosseum and the Spanish Steps; and in a more resonant moment, he shows us a flirting couple at the Fontana di Trevi, where Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg splashed about in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, more than 50 years ago.
While Fred is happy to read the obituaries, claiming he likes to catch up on his friends, top of Elsa’s bucket list is to dance in the same fountain in Rome as Anita Ekberg in La Dolce Vita.
But the film smothers the pair with cutesy touches (Elsa is obsessed with Fellini’s La Dolce Vita , especially the iconic scene in which Anita Ekberg frolics in the Trevi Fountain), many of which are lifted directly from the original but register as even cringier in this Anglo version.
When first we see her, she’s in bed watching La Dolce Vita and daydreaming she’s in a world created by Federico Fellini.
The most contrived plot element centers around Elsa's obsession with Fellini's La Dolce Vita.
Michael Radford's romantic comedy Elsa & Fred is a remake of Marcos Carnevale's Spanish-language film of the same name, and it also retains the original's obsession with La Dolce Vita.
Elsa never stops moving or talking, most often about her favorite fantasy, a famous scene in Frederico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.”
Roma (2018)
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón
influenced by Amarcord (1973), La Dolce Vita (1960), La Strada (1954), 8½ (1963), I Vitelloni (1953)
Visuals Themes
Although he says the title’s echoes of Fellini are unintentional (Roma is the name of the neighborhood he lived in), the movie’s rich pageantry does recall some of the more impressive set pieces of 8 1/2 or La Dolce Vita.
The “Roma” title and Fellini connection park it in a ’60s-70s cinema of “La Dolce Vita” and “Swept Away,” “Last Year at Marienbad” and “The Go Between” — languorous films whose auteurs refused to cut for clarity and dramatic impetus.
Folks who could never bite into the floaty neorealism of Fellini’s “8½” or “Amarcord” will struggle with the director’s languid sense of place and time, hoping for more of the disruptive chaos of the earthquake, wildfire and class revolt that punctuate the film.
The scene in a tunnel packed with cars is an image right out of the opening of Fellini’s autobiographical 8½ .
As if he is channeling Federico Fellini’s Amarcord, Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, Lucrecia Martel’s The Holy Girl or Edward Yang’s Yi Yi, there’s no denying Roma is Cuarón’s most personal film since his 2001 classic Y Tu Mamá También.
“Roma” is the sort of movie an ambitious director summons the power to make after a smash hit like “Gravity”: searingly personal, without movie stars, more “Amarcord” than space opera.
It's La dolce vita soured by '90s pop-culture clichés and Allen's mean-spirited imagination (his satiric eye and savvy are on the level of Entertainment Tonight).
The black-and-white cinematography, the metropolitan setting, and the subject matter bring to mind the wondrous La Dolce Vita, but the comparison is a pale one indeed.
This big, muddled, contemporary variation on La Dolce Vita, shot in breathtaking black and white by Sven Nykvist, contrasts the up-escalator and down-escalator rides of journalist Lee Simon (Kenneth Branagh, out-Woodying Woody in mannerisms, but why?), and his neurotic ex-wife, Robin (Allen's favorite wounded she-wolf, Judy Davis), a former literature teacher.
If writer/director Allen's Deconstructing Harry was a sour rehash of Wild Strawberries, the even more jaundiced Celebrity (notwithstanding Sven Nykvist 's lustrous b/w camerawork) could be his La Dolce Vita.
Apparently inspired by Fellini's La Dolce Vita and a year's subscription to People magazine -- not to mention his own travails -- writer-director Allen revels in the flashy, trashy world of misplaced acclaim and self-absorbed behavior.
But Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre does have the same bones, if a different skin, as countryman Federico Fellini’s 8½, still the point of comparison (and Mount Olympus) for movies about moviemaking.
It’s difficult for an expressionistic Italian film about a director experiencing an existential crisis to not evoke 8½ to some extent, but Nanni Moretti’s Mia Madre is its own lovely meditation on art and life.
Films about directors enduring mini-meltdowns – from Federico Fellini’s 8½ to Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories – are nothing new.
There are obvious echoes of Fellini’s “8½” in Nanni Moretti’s “Mia Madre,” in which film director Margherita (Margherita Buy) struggles to complete her latest picture—a drama about labor unrest at a family factory recently sold to an American entrepreneur who intends to lay off a large part of the workforce—while contending with the illness of her mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini), a former schoolteacher whose cardiac problems have forced her into the hospital.
The travails of Italian filmmakers has a rich screen lineage, stretching back to Federico Fellini's 8½, but the existential angst here is easily divined.
Knight of Cups (2015)
Directed by Terrence Malick
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960), 8½ (1963)
Themes Characters Visuals
When not occupied with agents or equally tormented family members like his brother (Wes Bentley) or his father ( Brian Dennehy ), Rick spends his time living the lush life to an extent actual screenwriters rarely do, going to "La Dolce Vita"-type Hollywood parties and cavorting with platoons of all-too-willing female accomplices.
We can safely infer that Bale’s character (identified as “Rick” in the closing credits) is meant to be a latter-day stand-in for that knight, a Hollywood type who has embraced la dolce vita and lost his sense of self in the process.
Despair abounds in stylish duds, no doubt, and parallels to chic sixties cinema are obvious, but it’s a far cry from the disaffected existentialism of L’Eclisse or La Dolce Vita.
(If there’s a model here, it’s Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, particularly in some star-packed party scenes set on the grounds of Antonio Banderas’ happily hedonistic character.)
…by Walter Chaw Terrence Malick's Knight of Cups is an obvious companion piece to Sofia Coppola's Somewhere and Fellini's 8½, and a less obvious spiritual companion to the Coens' Hail Caesar!, Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, and even Fosse's All That Jazz.
Loro (2018)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
influenced by La Dolce Vita (1960)
Themes Visuals Characters
That film, which one suspects loses everything on the small screen, was, in essence, a great, frothy homage to Federico Fellini's masterpiece, La Dolce Vita.
Combining the social satire of Fellini with the sinful hedonism of latter-day Scorsese – think La Dolce Vita via The Wolf of Wall Street – the party sequences are a riot of decadence.
In 2014 Paolo Sorrentino won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film for The Great Beauty , a movie that updated Fellini’s La Dolce Vita for the age of Silvio Berlusconi.
It is an obvious and unearned quotation of the beginning of Fellini’s masterpiece La Dolce Vita , when a helicopter carries a crucifix over Rome.
Scamarcio gives off a whiff of Tony Curtis in “Sweet Smell of Success,” and also of Marcello Mastroianni in “La Dolce Vita,” though his milieu makes theirs look positively antiseptic.
Shot and played in the manner of Federico Fellini's 8½, the section is highlighted by a playful sense of satire and the eerie revelation that, although we're never convinced Blanchett is playing a man (which wasn't the point anyway -- the point was to create an unexpected jolt of energy), the actress somehow looks much closer to Dylan than her fellow actors.
Haynes seems equally energized by his leading lady's work—using Fellini's 8½ as a visual reference point, he turns the mid-’60s into a phantasmagorical circus with Jude/Bob as its ringleader.
Youth (2015)
Directed by Paolo Sorrentino
influenced by 8½ (1963), Juliet of the Spirits (1965)
Visuals Themes Plot
“Youth,” which similarly has its way with Fellini’s “8½” (among other influences), is less focused and more banal, possessed of moments of great lyricism while indicating that Sorrentino is starting to repeat himself.
There’s an existential, borderline absurdist streak running through Youth, too; comparisons to Fellini’s 8½ aren’t that far-fetched.
Fellini’s influence, especially that of “8½,” remains, and while the whole package isn’t as demonstrably bravura as “Il Divo” or “The Great Beauty,” it’s more in touch with human experience.
Much as “The Great Beauty” positioned itself as a sorta-sequel to “La Dolce Vita,” for “Youth” Sorrentino borrows the setting from Fellini’s “8½” and shares The Maestro’s penchant for grotesques.
(Looking at this motley assemblage it is difficult to imagine what sort of career he is meant to have had, though it does establish rather conclusively that Sorrentino has some dim memory of seeing Fellini’s 8½ , as The Great Beauty confirmed his acquaintance with La Dolce Vita .)
His 2013 The Great Beauty was nothing if not La dolce vita for the 2010s; and now we meet up with Youth , which isn't quite as unabashed a clone of 8½ , but let's not go insulting everybody by pretending that a story of artists reflecting on the intersection of their art and their lives during a trip to a spa - one of them a film director having a beastly time casting the leading lady of his newest project - doesn't trigger some extremely strong associations.
A passion and appreciation of movies and moviemaking give this film a thematic backbone reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s “8½”and Giuseppe Tornatore’s “Nuovo Cinema Paradiso”.