The best of Fellini’s later films. It features his signature stylized art direction, raunchy humor and episodic plotting that featured heavily in his later films. But it also has the humanity and kindness that features prominently in his early films.

A movie of time (1930s Fascist Italy) and place (a fictional seaside town near the ancient remains of Rimini), Amarcord is Fellini’s semi-autobiographical story of meandering threads and ethereal townscapes. In the image of Woody Allen movies (or perhaps, vice-versa), the characters break the Fourth Wall, the camera wanders from conversation to conversation, and the plot feels more concerned about the the whole instead of the experiences of its parts. If there is a protagonist, it is Titta (Bruno Zanin), a teenage boy who gets himself entangled in teenage boy mishaps. It’s a comedy that skewers the absurdity of the Fascist period, from the impoverished to the powerful. The movie looks beautiful and if it weren’t for the chance of being randomly selected for torture at the hands of the Carabiniere, you’d want to transport yourself to this idyllic town and cavort with the locals. There’s probably more substance here than a typical viewer would extract, but they’re really coming for that feeling that so many films try to give but so few realize. Amarcord does it.

O filme é um delírio coletivo, desses que só o Fellini consegue realizar com maestria, uma "película" para se assistir em estado de graça, em alguns momentos parece-me ser quase que um sonho, poético e belo.

This is Fellini 'remembering' his youth in the way we really do- as stitched together fragments of actual moments, together with our mis-remembered bits and embellished versions; and a dream or two along the way. It's bawdy, buxom, crude, playful, lusty, and at times out loud funny. It's also the Fellini fart film. Lots of gaseous guffaws, if that's your thing. And being Italy, Catholicism creeps about. The aura of that 'die now, pay later' faith fairly coats the movie at times. Seeing this at the cinema is really the way to go. Audiences laugh a lot and seem to truly appreciate what Fellini was doing with all this raucous realm of horny delinquents, endowed dames, and a mom and dad at their ropes' end. "Amarcord" is filmmaking you sink into and marinate in dish that's equal parts savory, salty, and sweet. 4.3 stars

Storie di vita quotidiana in uno dei capolavori di Fellini che crea dal nulla un racconto vero, in cui chiunque si può rispecchiare e capace di avvicinare il cinema alla realtà in maniera spaventosa. Le vicissitudini e gli episodi ruotano intorno ad un giovane ragazzo di una famiglia operaia, in una cittadina di mare del centro Italia, piena di personaggi eccentrici e di personalità forti a cui viene dato il giusto spazio, seppure molti di loro fungano solo da comprimari. Non esiste una trama principale, ci si limita solamente a portare alla luce tutti gli avvenimenti più strambi e divertenti che possano capitare nell'arco di diversi anni ad una qualsiasi persona. Fellini crea un film che entra nella storia, e lo fa partendo dal nulla più totale; una poesia, seppure non ci siano forti emozioni al suo interno.

While it's a visual marvel and filled with great sound design it balances a few too many dull and slice of life story lines. You could watch a better Fellini film anyway this is just mediocre.

An enjoyable slice of life.

One of Fellini's finest films alongside La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2 and Satyricon. Reflecting the period of Fellini's childhood, the Mussolini years. This film has a real fun 'holiday' feel to it as we are introduced to the various livelihoods and guilty pleasures of a host of characters, that look as though they jumped right out of a seaside postcard. Hugely enjoyable.

An year in a life of an Italian town. Presented to you in the manner of a dream, unconstrained by even a glimmer of narrative. Filled with Fellini's memories and memories, that were passed down to him. Which in turn makes the town and its habitants act like caricatures who sprung from nostalgia for the lives and the period now gone. There are just a handful of characters, that have more than a few scenes in the film. But the trade-off is the immense amount of cinematic and gorgeous one-off scenes. It is pretty evident, how personal this movie is for Fellini. And despite his denial, it might be considered biographical, in the same manner as 'Mirror' for Tarkovsky would have ended up being. But more importantly, it needs to be highlighted, that the prime target of this genuine nostalgia in Amarcord isn't town, things or the period but people.

Unforgettable. Brings back childhood memories-fantasies by Fellini setups and characters.

The story of a town told through the lense of a teenage boy who just wants some sex, so as a consequence the whole town is basically fixated exclusively on sex, butts, masturbation, breasts, and touching each other. Everyone is writing about this as the perfect warm nostalgic movie, but I got more of an empty sad town where nobody has anything to do but jerk off and look at women. Every woman is a sexual object, every man is a sexual subject, at one point the nazis and the family's matriarch dies, and those are really the only parts that stand out. Still, feels very real. The people look like real people, and this does seem like the way a virgin boy would see the world.

fellini is a milestone in cinema but I can't stand it for more than 1 hour 1 hour and a half

Amarcord plays out as if Fellini had seen Bertolucci's The Conformist, and thought to himself, "I can make this into a black comedy!" An underlying mechanism is shared between them, conflating sexual impotence or inexperience with Italian Fascist dogma, but where Bertolucci cited his solitary principal protagonist's fall to Fascism as a combination of weak will, shame, and a desire to fit in (and as a tense, dramatic thriller), Fellini presents his vast array of characters as if their complacency with respect to the political movement is in partial appeasement of a series of romantic and sexual fantasies, which are often ridiculous and unrealistic. Told through a substantial range of characters that intentionally combine sentimentality and parody, Amarcord provides a great satire while simultaneously exploring the base and often crude elements that supported the rise of Fascism, which have been paralleled in other nationalistic and populist political movements. (4.5/5)

Blobbo saw in theater when came out. Want see again. (Might give all five stars but need see again. Memory-blob going bad.)

Not for me, but good

Fellini ‘s take on childhood in Mussolini's Italy.

Another classic by the great Federico Felini.

Almost unstructured, like a succession of dreams or an assemblage of childhood memories and of early youth, which, in fact, is, Amarcord captures the viewer with characters that are at the limit of caricature (or charged excessively in the rendering of their personality and characters). Amarcord highlights for the first time the fact that for Fellini cinema is above all magic, evocation, perhaps even exorcism. In one of the key sequences, placed almost at the end, lost in the fog the actors wonder "but where did they all go? Where did they go?" the surprise that everything goes away, passes, disappears. Fellini offers an exhilarating, free, surprising and elegant look at the Human Comedy by telling its vulgar, humorous, dramatic and poetic sides. Amarcord is also denouncing the censoring and "normative" power of totalitarianism, of the church, of adults against the anarchist freedom of childhood. A masterpiece that, like all masterpieces, has different levels of reading and asks the viewer to let himself go completely, to let himself be taken by the carousel of memories, so personal and at the same time so sharable.

Fellini's brilliant interweaving of fantasy and reality perfectly captures the childhood memory, the way we see our past through a romanticized lens. Highlighted by odd, bittersweet moments and spots of unexpected humor, this film is fascinating.

Fellini gives us a series of memories, fantasies, and dreams in the vignettes which make up his semi-autobiographical film 'Amarcord' ('I Remember'). The message which comes through is loving, and about the gaiety of life, embracing its madcap characters and moments - moments which will someday live in our memories, hazy though they grow, as little diamonds of light. I loved the scenes satirizing the Fascists and the Catholic Church, and they're all the more powerful in this context, where they are reduced in significance, and just another zany thing Italians dealt with (or deal with) in life. The film doesn't strike any major philosophical chords, briefly coming close as men peer up into the heavens, but the lines uttered as a poem by a construction worker are powerful ("My grandfather made bricks / My father made bricks / I make bricks, too / but where's my house?"). I may be in the minority here, but the film didn't strike me as particularly beautiful, though it was a pleasure to see Magali Noël (Rififi, La Dolce Vita, and many others). It held my interest, but lacked a big punch, even in its sentimentality, though I was always pulling for it, and loved the many references to Hollywood actors from the 1930's. Unfortunately, there is not enough depth here to consider it a great film, and Fellini too often indulged in caricatures and juvenile humor. Net, a mixed bag.