"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 . . ."