"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."

"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."

"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."

"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."

"No other filmmaker’s movies have reached me as directly and deeply as Fellini’s. I’m very familiar with the criticisms that have been leveled at Fellini’s work—and they hold no sway over me. There’s far too much to say about the films on my list, so here are a few random things I love. The White Sheik: Alberto Sordi’s hilarious faux suavity while trying to seduce a naive provincial woman. I vitelloni: Franco Fabrizi’s pathetic lothario, Leopoldo Trieste’s deluded would-be writer, Alberto Sordi’s sad, daydreaming freeloader—Fellini sees all of these aimless young men with great honesty and tenderness. Nights of Cabiria: the heartbreaking final scene, a woman stripped of all physical and spiritual worth yet somehow still able to find consolation in the very innocence and joy that have been denied her. 8½: I can’t think of another black-and-white movie that has so much white. The high-contrast cinematography is breathtaking. In one flashback to childhood, Guido is being bathed and cared for by various aunts. It’s a child’s experience of maternal love that cannot be re-created in adult life—as Fellini later illustrates with a twisted version of the same scene in Guido’s absurd harem fantasy. Fellini always claimed the movie was a comedy, and I tend to agree. Amarcord: Fellini revisits the same territory as I vitelloni but in his later, color-saturated, theatrical style. It is provincial life described by a highly unreliable narrator, where the mundane transforms into the magical. A few indelible images: lonesome boys waltzing to music from a nearby grand hotel, townspeople carting their old furniture to the square for a massive bonfire, the immense luxury liner Rex, Gradisca’s sad little wedding, the floating dandelion puffs that mark the return of spring . . ."

"If I had to have one favorite movie that I’ve seen a hundred times, it’s probably that. I’m not really sure why I first liked it; I must have been fourteen or something like that when I first saw it. It’s always meant so much to me. Peter Riegert plays a maybe 40-year-old businessman who’s in the oil business and is called and sent up to the coast of Scotland to look into buying some land where they found some oil and he has to negotiate with the local village. [He] thinks it’s going to be a very tough thing to sort of uproot all these people, [and] the comedy is that they’re only too happy to sell out. They’re just trying to negotiate the price up as much as possible. It unfolds at its own pace, and he falls in love with this town and with the sea and cares less and less about the deal. He more and more wants to trade places with the local innkeeper and move to this town and stay there. A beautifully made film and I feel like there was a rash of movies right afterward that sort of tried to capture what he achieved. These people sort of coming to some little town and being transformed. It’s so touching and so funny and warm, and has so many moments of grief and elegance and delicacy. It’s got beautiful music by Mark Knopfler. That might have been the first movie that I felt that strongly about at that sort of formative time. But it’s very strange to feel like that’s the movie, you know? It doesn’t have some young protagonist. [But] from then on I was obsessed with Scotland and Ireland. Wanting desperately to go up there, and then when I did, it was very similar to that feeling. I went [on] a Bill Forsyth binge and watched all of his movies, like Gregory’s Two Girls, and Comfort and Joy, and Breaking In, even, with Burt Reynolds of all people. I wish he were still making movies."