Film Forum

12:20 & 5:45 ONLY

(1963) Torn between mistress Sandra Milo and wife Anouk Aimée, and totally devoid of ideas for his next picture, Felliniesque director Marcello Mastroianni escapes into childhood memories and sexual fantasies... until a final epiphany. Seamless, seemingly autobiographical interweaving of reality, memory and dreams, a stylistic breakthrough and an influence on generations of moviemakers. Academy Award®, Best Foreign Language Film. DCP. Approx. 138 min. In Italian with English subtitles.

A JANUS FILMS RELEASE

Reviews

“FELLINI’S CHEF D’OEUVRE… HIS ELEGANT, RAMBUNCTIOUS CIRCUS OF A MOVIE! This most grandly self-centered of movie extravaganzas hasn't aged a minute.”
– Vincent Canby, The New York Times

“The best film ever made about filmmaking.. bursting with inspiration. I have seen 8 ½ over and over again, and my appreciation only deepens. It does what is almost impossible: Fellini is a magician who discusses, reveals, explains and deconstructs his tricks, while still fooling us with them. He claims he doesn't know what he wants or how to achieve it, and the film proves he knows exactly, and rejoices in his knowledge.”
– Roger Ebert

“If all you know about this exuberant, self-regarding 1963 film is based on its countless inferior imitations, you owe it to yourself to see Federico Fellini's exhilarating, stocktaking original, an expressionist, circuslike comedy… It's Fellini's last black-and-white picture and conceivably the most gorgeous and inventive thing he ever did.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“In terms of execution I cannot remember a more brilliant film. In image, visual ingenuity, subtlety of pace, sardonic humor, it is stunning. We see a wizard at the height of his wizardry, and it has something of the effect, given in contemporary reports, of Liszt playing Liszt.”
– Stanley Kauffmann, The New Republic

“Fellini's film is complete, simple, beautiful, honest, like the one Guido wants to make in ​8 ½.”
– François Truffaut

“8 ½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways—the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearl—again, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo). But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself.”
– Martin Scorsese