i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Am I Missing Something?

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

Fellini's ROMA imposingly alternates between two paralleled narratives in Rome, his salad days during the WWII and the beginning of 1970s, when he is an eminent filmmaker making a new film about the city, erratically charts its local customs and folk culture to pay homage to an ancient and great city. Structurally, the film doesn't stick to a linear one, instead it disguises with a pseudo-documentary style, in fact, most of the scenes were re-constructed in Cinecittà, however, Fellini stuns audience again with his majestic undertaking which significantly blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction.The film is not just an ode to the city, more prominently, it is the clashes between past and present that reverberate strongly today. His young self (played by Falcon), a doe-eyed townie arrives in Rome for college, enjoys a boisterous dinner in the street trattoria with the entire neighbourhood, watches a shoddy variety show with crude spectators which would be interrupted by an air raid, flirts with the brothel for the first time; when time leaps forward to the 1970s, the flower-child generation is consuming with alienation and torpidity, a poetic episode of the underground metro construction team encounters an undiscovered catacomb, where fresh air breaches into the isolated space and ruins all its frescoes in a jiffy. A superlative conceit encapsulates the dilemma between modern civilisation and ancient heritage.There is no absence of Fellini-esque extravaganza, the brothels during wartime are quintessentially embellished with crazed peculiarity and vulgarity for its zeitgeist and national spirit, where sex can be simply traded as commodity without any emotional investment. The most striking one, is the flamboyant fashion-show of church accouterments organised by Princess Domitilla (De Doses) for Cardinal Ottaviani (Giovannoli), consummated in an overblown resurrection of the deceased Pope, it is sacrilege in its most diverting form, only Fellini can shape it with such grand appeal and laugh about it.Two notable celebrity cameos, Gore Vidal, expresses his love of the city from an expatriate slant, and more poignant one is from Anna Magnani, her final screen presence - Ciao, buonanotte! - a sounding farewell for this fiery cinema icon. The epilogue, riding with a band of motorists, visiting landmarks in the night, Fellini's ROMA breezily captures this city's breath of life, sentimental to its distinguished history, meanwhile vivacious even farcical in celebrating its ever-progressing motions, a charming knockout!

It's hard for me to render an objective verdict on Fellini Roma because, while being a rather unbalanced film--containing some trite stuff along with cinematographic gold--it also includes three episodes that fascinate me. The first one directly involves something I love, that's the journey of the film crew along the tunnel of the subway in construction. There is something surreal about that segment, something that gives it an out-of-this-world quality, while still belonging to our day to day, trivial reality. In my I Vitelloni review I said that Fellini had the capacity of making classics out of the most ordinary situations and this scene proves it. Because there's nothing in such episode that doesn't belong to our everyday reality, yet the feeling is that of a magical journey, something out of a fable. For ex., when the engineer orders to activate the cutter, what comes next doesn't look like a simple mechanical procedure, the drilling of a rock, but as it he had awakened instead a prehistoric monster, a dragon who was sleeping in the depths of the Earth and who starts suddenly breathing, slowly raising on its hinged legs over the men, thrusting its Alien-like jaws towards them. Here's is where Fellini's cinematographic genius appears at its best, as scenes like that one we may have seen many times in the news in TV, in civil engineering films, yet here the thing becomes surreal, straddles the realm of the fantastic. And all those effects, the eerie atmosphere, have been achieved simply with camera angles, lightning, the hovering dust, and the fact that all we hear is the life-like roar of the cutter. But he goes even further, he flirts also with the esoteric: even before the crew gets into the 2000-year Roman house, we viewers see what it's inside. Amazingly enough, one of the frescoes contains the uncannily accurate portrait of one of the crew members, who starts at that very moment feeling sick. Coincidence? Point for reincarnation? Lots to ponder there.The second episode I loved is that of the chaos in the highway, specially the night scenes. Compare the incredible vivacity of it, the joyous exuberance, the pulsating life of the city in the midst of the mass of intermingled cars, trucks; in the cacophony of innumerable horns; in all the dirty gestures, smirks, stares flying from car to car and back; in the stoic, angry, perplexed expressions in mirrors, windows, windshields--all that while the camera boom goes up and down, right and left--compare this magnificent chaos with the dead--fish opening of 8½. No way: on one hand we got a Fellini in full possession of his means, at the peak of his artistic creativity; on the other, an spiritually dead, practically sterile Fellini.The third episode I love here is the Vatican fashion show. As I've said about Buñuel, fans of Fellini tend to sell him short when it comes to social, political or religious commentary. True, they may be thinking they are just throwing jabs but, as irrepressible artists they are, the end result has always had a much greater reach. Think of Cervantes, who all what he wanted was to ridicule the Harry Potters of his day and who ended up penning instead the greatest literary work in History. That's how I see works where Buñuel or Fellini seem just being mean to the Church, the elites: they just can't help going far beyond that, reach new levels. Being neutral in the subject I find a subversive beauty in this scene, even if taken as mockery--not to mention the fact that there's nothing that excludes that the Church actually does some kind of exhibition when studying new trappings for its members. But the beauty of that scene, at least for me, it's in that it escapes the purely derisory and becomes--once again--a surreal experience, to which contributes much the haunting Rota score. The only thing I didn't get was the arrival of the old man with glasses who brings the house down, so to speak. "Our Pope is back!". What was the meaning of that, the Second Coming, a return to happier times?.Oh, the movie itself is a itinerary through time of the historic Rome from the 1930s to 1972, all seen through Fellini's eyes and life experience, yet you are never allowed to forget that this is a city thousands of years old. From the initial shot of a stone road sign, to a school principal talking to students about Cesar and crossing the Rubicon himself; to the movies in the matinée; to the ruins of buildings & monuments that liter the landscape, we are being constantly reminded that this isn't just a city that has lived through History but one that also contains History, one that's History itself, the cradle of our Western civilization nothing less. And this is Fellini's homage to it.Fellini Roma has no plot to properly speak of, just vignettes through time & place; the lives of Romans under Fascism, during war—including the ways they used to have a good time: communal diners, Variety shows, movie matinées--up to present day 1972, with the problems usual to urban sprawl: pollution, subway construction, hippies and other assorted malcontents. Fellini's cinematography is there and so his weird looking people with their odd behavior. In all it makes for an entertaining film, except for the bordello scenes, which I found rather long and tedious. I give it a 7.5/10 but I'll add 0.5 just because I loved that underground scene—what can I do, it's that personal background kicking again.

This is my all around favourite film, although I like SF and Horror films also, this film, despite it being over 35 years old, still carries a powerful feeling to it-to me. It shows Rome through the eyes of someone who has seen it maybe for what it really is- a thoroughly confused and maze like place where things don't happen in any kind of an order, events just fall on top of one another, and you are left to sift through the mess in the hope of finding what you went there for in the first place. The film is a unique depiction of European society that is not seen anymore for the most part in this age of perfect films with perfect people having perfectly orchestrated experiences that are always just slightly left of mainstream with heavy nods to normal, which I think does not reflect the true nature of what it is to be a struggling human on this planet. This filmmaker has the balls to criticize the Roman Catholic Church, which he does in this film, showing them as mindless glory hounds, instead of the way they are mostly depicted in 99 percent of films. Roma is also crude in places, more so than what you might expect from a film made in 1972.

It's well known that Fellini abandoned linear, narrative film-making sometime during 8½, though perhaps the seeds were already being sewn with his two episodic dramas, Nights of Cabiria and La Dolce Vita. Like those films, Fellini-Roma offers up a similarly episodic, shambolic and deeply romanticised depiction of Italy's capital. However, unlike those films, there is no central figure or narrator, like the prostitute Cabiria or Marcello the playboy journalist, to guide us through Fellini's labyrinthine concoction; only the fevered musings of it's director and the rambling recollections of a series of fanciful weirdoes. Thus, the film isn't a film in the traditional sense, but rather, a fusion of documentary style-footage and stylised recreations of characters, places, times and events.Many have criticised the film (as well as others from the same era, particularly Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon, Fellini-Casanova and The City of Women) as being trivial, meandering and self-indulgent, all of which are true, but certainly the element of indulgence and theatrical abstraction (as well as a penchant for the outrageous and arcane) was always part of Fellini's appeal. Here, the previous hints of free-form abstraction, is taken further, with all semblance of story removed, so the film, unlike his previous two films Juliet of the Spirits and Satyricon, which were abstract and sprawling but still had a sense of character and plot, Roma instead, wanders along from one scene to the next, with no real focus on character (although there are many faces that reoccur throughout) and nothing in the way of narrative momentum. Now, this will undoubtedly be a problem for some viewers who require a sense of pace or meaning to their films, though, for those of us still interested in what Fellini has to offer, regardless of content (or lack, thereof), it is perhaps best to think of the film as a collection of scenes to dip in and out of at random.As was the case with many later-Fellini, the film has a number of intoxicating set pieces scattered sporadically throughout, amongst the most impressive being an epic fashion show replete with the trademark Fellini grotesques, social and political commentaries and a fair bit of sniping, sycophantic star-worship. Other standouts, with the film traversing a number of different time periods, include a reconstruction of Rome during the reign of Mussolini, a heated traffic jam on the autostrada and a lengthy documentary-like scene following a group of archaeologists searching through Rome's labyrinth of subway systems. There are a variety of other set pieces scattered throughout the film that probably warrant some sort of mention, but they just didn't resonate with me as highly as they have with certain other viewers.However, that's one of the great things about Fellini-Roma, with the director stringing together a series of impressionist sketches that will no doubt conjure different moods and emotions in whoever watches the film. As was apparent right from the start with Fellini, was his ability to evoke a certain time and place through his images, set-construction, sound-design, and overall iconography... and that's certainly evident here. Of course, like all of the director's work from this period, the film won't be to all tastes, with many no doubt despairing of the filmmaker's seeming indulgence, pretension and wanton disregard of character and narrative. However, if you treat the film more like an episodic tapestry (or travelogue) to dip in and out of, then you're sure to get a lot out of Fellini's majestic, carefully orchestrated imagery, bizarre cavalcade of clowns, freaks, geeks and weirdoes (not to mention the usual barrage of buxom ladies), and a collection of cameos and in-jokes from a variety of Fellini regulars.For my money, this film isn't quite as essential as 8 ½, Amarcord, La Dolce Vita or ...And the Ship Sails on, though it does rank alongside the sentimental La Strada and the similarly episodic Night of Cabiria (I'm not sure whether or not I prefer Casanova over this... I'd have to see both films again) and is much better than the free-form bombardment of Juliet of the Spirits, Satyricon and The City of Women (in my opinion, at least). Regardless of the comparisons to his previous films, Fellini-Roma is still an enchanting film with some astounding moments of visual spectacle to compensate for the overall lack of plot. Probably a worthwhile purchase for die-hard Fellini fans, though those new to the director's work would be better off starting elsewhere.