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La Dolce Vita

La Dolce Vita (1960)

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93

Average Rating: 8.5/10
Critic Reviews: 15
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 1

No consensus yet.

audience

90

liked it
Average Rating: 4.2/5
User Ratings: 31,558

My Rating

Movie Info

In one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s, Federico Fellini featured Marcello Mastrioanni as gossip columnist Marcello Rubini. Having left his dreary provincial existence behind, Marcello wanders through an ultra-modern, ultra-sophisticated, ultra-decadent Rome. He yearns to write seriously, but his inconsequential newspaper pieces bring in more money, and he's too lazy to argue with this setup. He attaches himself to a bored socialite (Anouk Aimée), whose search

Sep 21, 2004

American International Picture

Cast

All Critics (56) | Top Critics (15) | Fresh (58) | Rotten (1) | DVD (15)

Perhaps many spectators will squirm at the three-hour length of the film or of some of its sequences (though director Federico Fellini cut some 30 minutes from his final print), yet others will never notice they've sat that long.

May 8, 2007 Full Review Source: Variety | Comment
Variety
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The film was hugely successful and widely praised in its time, though it's really nothing more than the old C.B. De Mille formula of titillation and moralizing.

Chicago Reader
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[An] epic of anomie.

December 27, 2004 Full Review Source: Arizona Republic | Comment
Arizona Republic
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Everyone has a favorite scene.

December 27, 2004 Comment
Hollywood Reporter
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Marcello's journey is a string of remarkable vignettes that delivers fashion and sociology in equal measure.

December 24, 2004 Full Review Source: Denver Post | Comment
Denver Post
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It comes from a period in which the filmmaker was perched between neorealism and all-out fantasia. As such, it represents the best of two worlds, even as Marcello can't find contentment in either one.

December 2, 2004 Full Review Source: Dallas Morning News | Comment
Dallas Morning News
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A lovely Italian palette that questions if we can settle down to a life of struggle without having first lived life at its best.

August 15, 2011 Full Review Source: Oscar Guy | Comment
Oscar Guy

What is happiness within the film's world? Fellini offers no easy answers.

June 3, 2011 Full Review Source: Slant Magazine | Comment
Slant Magazine

Everything has changed, and nothing has changed. How sour it still is.

June 1, 2011 Full Review Source: Time Out New York | Comment
Time Out New York

Along with his later 8 1/2, La Dolce Vita is regarded as one of acclaimed Italian director Federico Fellini's best-loved and most influential films. The '60s-set tale of one man's struggle with the so-called "sweet life" stars Marcello Mastroi

February 17, 2010 Full Review Source: AskMen.com | Comment
AskMen.com

The satire on display is so simultaneously subtle yet blatant that the movie itself is intoxicating.

April 24, 2009 Full Review Source: Daily Radar | Comment
Daily Radar

In spite of its thematic ugliness, this is a stunning-looking trawl through the Italian capital, with Ekberg's impromptu paddle in the Trevi fountain still the films enduring image.

April 20, 2009 Full Review Source: Film4 | Comment

Mágico e inesquecível, representa não apenas um fascinante estudo de personagem, mas também um mergulho dilacerante na fragilidade humana. E Ekberg tornou-se, para sempre, uma das maiores personificações de sensualidade oferecidas pelo Cinema.

April 10, 2009 Comment
Cinema em Cena

It's winsome because of the stylish cinematography, which fills the screen with mind-blowing bizarre visuals.

July 16, 2007 Full Review Source: Ozus' World Movie Reviews | Comment
Ozus' World Movie Reviews

...experienced as a series of bizarre vignettes, a headlong rush into the heady air of Rome's Via Veneta , its swank nightclubs and seedy gigolos, the perfume of fame and the stink of money.

June 13, 2007 Full Review | Comment
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Films don't get more essential than this.

May 8, 2007 Full Review Source: Oregonian | Comment
Oregonian

Federico Fellini's "La Dolce Vita" operates on so many levels that it's tough to know where Fellini is coming from or where he's headed, regardless of how many times you've watched his film.

December 11, 2006 Full Review Source: Arizona Daily Star | Comment
Arizona Daily Star

After what we've seen of decadence during the past three decades or so, La Dolce Vita now seems tame, but people wasting time in nightclubs, dancing in the fountains of Rome, and just generally hanging out seemed a bit of a shock in 1960.

August 29, 2006 Full Review Source: TV Guide's Movie Guide | Comment
TV Guide's Movie Guide

There are perhaps a couple of party scenes too many, and the peripheral characters can be unconvincing, but the stylish cinematography and Fellini's bizarre, extravagant visuals are absolutely riveting.

January 26, 2006 Full Review Source: Time Out | Comment
More Critic Reviews

Audience Reviews for La Dolce Vita

This doesn't happen very often, but I must say, I'm rather baffled. I'm not sure how I truly feel about this movie. I don't know if I truly get it. I'm a smart guy, and I'd like to think I can 'get' artsy European cinema, but I am simultaneously aware of why this is called a classic but also baffled as to why it is so

February 6, 2011
cosmo313
Chris Weber

Super Reviewer

A gossip columnist has a raucous time of it in Rome with various starlets and high society types.I dreaded seeing this film because I found most of Fellini's other work to be vapid and unimpressive, but La Dolce Vita was not that bad. It's not remarkably inaccessible like 8 1/2 or banal like Amaracord, but because

August 1, 2011
hunterjt13
Jim Hunter

Super Reviewer

    1. Sylvia: Marcello, come here!
    – Submitted by Celeste C (8 months ago)
    1. Steiner: Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weigh upon me. Peace frightens me; perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it is only a façade hiding the face of hell. I think, 'What is in store for my children tomorrow?' 'The world will be wonderful', they say. But from whose viewpoint? If one phone call could announce the end of everything? We need to live in a state of suspended animation like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside of time, detached.
    – Submitted by Lacey H (9 months ago)

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Foreign Titles

  • Das süße Leben (DE)
  • The Sweet Life (La Dolce Vita) (CA)
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