8 1/2

Federico Fellini's Oscar-nominated 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of storytelling and cinema. The most autobiographical of Fellini's films, the plot of which concerns a 43-year-old film director who is having a midlife crisis, it is a career benchmark for this magnificent Italian New Wave director. Beautifully choreographed with flashbacks, dream sequences, exaggerated fantasy scenes, and magical surrealist episodes, 8 1/2 is one of the richest, most exuberant movies ever made, in the mode of Fellini's artfully abstract LA DOLCE VITA and AMARCORD.

Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) is at a crisis point in his life and his work; in the opening sequence, Guido, suffocating, is caught in traffic with the windows of his car locked shut. He climbs out of the sunroof and literally rises up over the highway into the clouds, seemingly free, when he realizes there's a rope tied around his ankle that is violently pulling him back to earth. Cutting from this dream to the health spa where Guido is trying to recapture his creativity and write the screenplay for his next film, his vices become clear: Guido is self-absorbed, and he's distracted by the fabulous cast of actresses, intellectuals, and eccentrics who have joined him at the spa. Additionally he struggles with Freudian complexes about his wife (Anouk AimTe), his lover (Sandro Milo), his ideal woman (Claudia Cardinale), and his dead parents; and his repressive Catholic guilt follows him everywhere like a haunting mist.

"...8 1/2 is the best film ever made about filmmaking....The film weaves in and out of reality and fantasy....It is a film filled to bursting with inspiration..." - Chicago Sun-Times

"...The most famous screen treatise ever about the illogical undertaking of making a movie..." - USA Today

"...The greatest mind-game movie ever..." - Entertainment Weekly

"...[T]he ideas and texture of 8 1/2 have never ceased to be an inspiration to artists everywhere..." - Premiere

"[T]he film teems with Jungian imagery, while grappling with the alienating effects of modernity and, overall, the exasperating quest for contentment in an arbitrary and uncertain world." - Empire

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