Amarcord and Fanny and Alexander.

"Back in the days when art houses were temples of cinema and auteurs their living gods, few filmmakers cast longer shadows than Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman," writes Lance Goldenberg in the Voice. "Time and changing tastes took their inevitable toll on both art houses and auteurs, but everything old is new again this week; as fate would have it, Fanny and Alexander, Bergman's 1982 swansong to the cinema, surfaces for one week at the IFC Center just as a new print of Fellini's Amarcord, the 1974 Oscar winner that turned out to be the director's last creative gasp, opens for two weeks at Film Forum."

Updated through 12/6.

"When [Amarcord] opened, in 1973, some viewers criticized its view of Fascist enthusiasm as just one more natural folly of the period," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "The new print... will be a chance to revisit that debate - to ask whether affection can blur as well as compel."

"Fellini's loose narrative of classroom pranks, curvaceous women, swearing old men, gleefully narrated tall tales, and colorful community rituals mostly adds up to an empty romp - and that's the point," writes Darrell Hartman for Artforum. "[M]any of the town's routines come across as ribald good fun, and it is easy to misinterpret Fellini's familiarity with his caricatures - namely Gradisca (Magali Noël), the village belle - as affection."

"With ellipses for eerie beauty, whole stretches of the movie consist of horniness and hysterics and taunts and laughter, more or less reflecting the discerning tastes of a pimply schoolboy," writes Nicolas Rapold in the L Magazine.

Related: At the Auteurs, Amarcord and Fanny and Alexander.

Online viewing tip. Film Forum has the Amarcord trailer.

Update, 12/4: "With references to his work in recent films by Tim Burton, Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, Federico Fellini is, perhaps, making a comeback," writes Michael Joshua Rowin in Reverse Shot. "On its face that would seem to be a ludicrous statement: due to tireless self-promotion and on the strength of a wholly unique body of work, Fellini is still one of the most famous names in the history of cinema. And yet, since his death in 1993 Fellini's importance has been downgraded to relatively minor status (the same can be said for recently departed Antonioni and Bergman).... Amarcord is a work of caricature, but compared to the aliens and automatons of Satyricon and Casanova, it is a work of identifiable human beings, and a humanistic one at that."

Update, 12/5: "Only Tarkovsky's similar reminiscence, The Mirror, can match Amarcord for surreal intensity," writes David Fear in Time Out New York.

Update, 12/6: "Even in a film as whimsical, as loving and as devoted to pleasing the audience as Amarcord, Fellini is a vastly subtler and bigger artist than the many subsequent filmmakers who've tried to imitate him, and who typically seize on the sticky-sweet syrup and bon-vivant erotica, while avoiding the vinegary aftertaste." Andrew O'Hehir in Salon: "He always understood that the storyteller's magical incantations, which allow the past to live again, bring back the things that still hurt and the things that never made sense along with the joys."

Posted by dwhudson at December 3, 2008 6:27 AM