Federico Fellini, long a scripter, in his second feature film satirizes the 'wastrels', the do-nothing sons of middle-class Italian provincials whose life ranges from schoolroom to poolroom.
I Vitelloni(I vitelloni)
✭ ✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Italy, France · 1953
1h 43m
Director Federico Fellini
Starring Franco Interlenghi, Alberto Sordi, Franco Fabrizi, Leopoldo Trieste
Genre Comedy, Drama
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Five young men dream of success as they drift lazily through life in a small Italian village. As Fausto, the group’s leader, chases a string of women -- to the horror of his pregnant wife -- the other four blunder their way from one experience to the next.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
The New York Times by Dana Stevens
Full of brilliantly executed coups de théâtre, showing the director's natural flair for spectacle.
Moving from cafés to poolrooms to movie theaters, it's the prototypical male ensemble film.
Los Angeles Times by Kevin Thomas
It was this ineffably poignant semiautobiographical reverie that unleashed fully Fellini's shimmering, flowing poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by Fellini's potently evocative collaborator, Nino Rota.
Its as wistful and sad as it is funny and charming, with the first of Nino Rotas great scores to keep it burbling along.
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
One of the screen's great portrayals of the hell-raising and malaise of young men in their 20s, hit Italy like a comic thunderbolt when it was released there in 1953 -- and it struck the American art-house audience in much the same way when it premiered here in 1956. Now it returns, and unlike its five aging-boy protagonists, this movie hasn't lost its first youth.
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
It's a film of sensitivity, observation and humor - a must-see for Fellini enthusiasts and a worthwhile investment for everyone else.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
Its elements all come together with an unforced perfection, every scene feels real and alive in a way that many of his more surrealistic later films do not, and Leonard Maltin, for one, has argued that I Vitelloni is no less than Fellini's masterpiece.
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