Streaming: celebrate Fellini at 100

Federico Fellini celebrates his 100th birthday on 20 January – in an inactive sense, admittedly, given that he left us back in 1993. It’s a centenary worth noting. Thirty years on from his last film, Fellini still feels like the first name in Italian cinema, the one laymen can remember even if they’ve never seen a frame of his work, and the one whose imprint – or many imprints, given his wild directorial evolution from stark neorealism to baroque stylisation – is most visible in the contemporary work of compatriots from Paolo Sorrentino to Alice Rohrwacher.

The BFI is marking the milestone with a touring retrospective of Fellini’s work, though the BFI Player has some choice fare for those who can’t get to a cinema. The centrepiece of their selection, unsurprisingly, is La Dolce Vita, itself celebrating a 60th anniversary this year, and still looking rather chic – thanks in part to a recent 4K facelift. Once an emblem of new-era hedonism, its roving, restlessly horny tour through Rome’s beautiful celebrity set may not shock as it once did, but it retains its mesmerising whirligig energy. If the paparazzi-targeting satire seems a little less harsh these days too, that’s largely because so much pop commentary has followed in its sleek-suited, skinny-tied image. And was Marcello Mastroianni ever so electric?

The other essential title on offer is 8½, another exercise in darkly glamorous soul-searching, though its edge has perhaps stayed a little sharper over the decades. This, of course, is Fellini’s moody, distorted self-portrait, with Mastroianni as a tortured, ambitious auteur losing himself amid fawning admirers, clashing desires and wildly spiralling artistic goals. It’s still the most headily seductive and repulsive of all films about film-making: watch it in a double feature with Pedro Almodóvar’s complementary Pain and Glory (see below).

The BFI’s other picks are slightly deeper cuts. Initially made for Italian TV, his 1970 documentary I Clowns delves into his fascination with those painted circus stalwarts, though it might help to share his enthusiasm. A curio he sandwiched between making La Dolce Vita and 8½, the 1962 portmanteau film Boccaccio ’70 assembles four short films by Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Vittorio De Sica and Mario Monicelli for a bawdy, roundabout view of romantic morals and mores in the then modern Italy, it’s most interesting as a snapshot of each auteur’s contrasting style and preoccupations at the time. Riffing lightly off La Dolce Vita, Fellini’s contribution, The Temptation of Dr Antonio – about a self-appointed moral guardian haunted by visions of Anita Ekberg – is more amusing than major.

A more intriguing anthology film on the menu is L’Amore, a two-part project directed by Roberto Rossellini from separate scripts by Fellini and Jean Cocteau. In Fellini’s section, he also stars as a handsome drifter taken for a saint by a naively devout peasant (Anna Magnani): once banned in the US, it’s lithely provocative and sensuous.

Those titles are all available to BFI Player subscribers; casual punters can stream I Vitelloni and Amarcord on a pay-per-view basis. Both are superb, with variously autobiographical elements: the former a lively, rough-and-ready study of young masculinity battling the strictures of postwar provincial life, the latter a riotously colourful but tender trawl through a fascist-era childhood, peppered with grotesques and eccentrics.

If you want to continue your Fellini exploration beyond the BFI Player, meanwhile, other streaming options include Juliet of the Spirits, his glorious magical-realist tale of a neglected wife’s psychological liberation, available for free to Amazon Prime subscribers, or La Strada, his heart-piercing and enduringly influential study of a young woman sold to a travelling carnival, available on YouTube. Finally, in a happy confluence, Fellini’s rarely seen directorial debut, The White Sheik – a spry, playful romantic comedy matching earthy realism with flighty farce – is on Mubi’s streaming menu for the next three weeks. In all, a welcome shot of Italian warmth in the new year drear.

New to streaming and DVD this week

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Pain and Glory
(Pathé, 15)
Pedro Almodóvar’s latest continues in the more melancholic, autumnal vein of 2016’s Julieta, but this time with a more personal spin. Reunited with him after nearly 30 years, Antonio Banderas is on career-best form as the director’s aching alter ego.

Rojo
(Drakes Avenue, 15)
If you missed this Argentine stunner on its small cinema release, catch up with it now. A queasily atmospheric thriller set on the brink of the 1975 coup d’etat, Benjamin Naishtat’s film prickles with political rage and social malaise.

It Chapter 2
(Warner Bros, 15)
The Stephen King chestnut of your childhood nightmares lumbers on in the starrier second half of Andy Muschietti’s adaptation. It’s polished and duly spooky on a scene-to-scene basis, but why on earth is it three hours long?

Holiday
(Sony, U)
Still stuck in the January doldrums? Here’s all you need: given a sparkly Criterion treatment, George Cukor’s 1938 cross-class romance is among the most perfect of all Hollywood romcoms, played with fleet joy by Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.