"This is my favorite Fellini movie. It’s so fun and sweet and bold and effortlessly weird. You feel this young filmmaker surprising himself. It also captures the claustrophobic yet epic feeling of growing up in a small town and hanging out with your childhood friends all the time. And the whole carnival sequence is so great . . . especially the aftermath, when Alberto Sordi is wandering around the town square at dawn dragging an oversize clown head."

"Alberto Sordi, the star of several early Fellini films, is both hilarious and heartbreaking in this story of a well-intentioned man who gets caught up in a horrible situation while trying to do the right thing for his family and hometown. I love Italy anyway, and so the black-and-white cinematography of Sicily alone is worth the price of admission. It’s one of those comedies that stays with you long after you’ve watched it."

"My favorite of all Fellini’s films, it seems his most perfect and certainly his most likable and affecting. And it’s his most comical, thanks to the wonderful performances of Leopoldo Trieste and, especially, Alberto Sordi, who went on to star in over three hundred films in Italy and is rightly regarded as their greatest actor. Its story also prefigures the theme of three of his later films (La dolce vita, Toby Dammit, and Ginger and Fred), as to the corrosive effect of the new media religion of celebrity. In 1950, the inroads of paganism on Christianity still seemed only foolish when a photo¬-comic-book character almost destroys a Catholic marriage. But already by 1959, the lust for media attention had become all consuming and malignant in La dolce vita, where a journalist goes from one idiotic media event to another, including an imagined miracle in the rain. In Toby Dammit, on a nightmarish TV talk show, the church itself parades in front of the TV cameras; and in Ginger and Fred, about another ridiculous TV celebrity program, it has all become totally absurd, only momentarily relieved by a nostalgia for older performers. Half a century later, the celebrity media religion rules, and there is no end to its reign in sight."