Writing for L'Espresso, the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia highlighted the film's variations in tone,
Highly expressive throughout, Fellini seems to change the tone according to the subject matter of each episode, ranging from expressionist caricature to pure neo-realism. In general, the tendency to caricature is greater the more severe the film's moral judgement although this is never totally contemptuous, there being always a touch of complacence and participation, as in the final orgy scene or the episode at the aristocrats' castle outside Rome, the latter being particularly effective for its descriptive acuteness and narrative rhythm.[33]
In Filmcritica XI, Italian poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini argued that "La dolce vita was too important to be discussed as one would normally discuss a film.
Though not as great as Chaplin, Eisenstein or Mizoguchi, Fellini is unquestionably an author rather than a director. The film is therefore his and his alone... The camera moves and fixes the image in such a way as to create a sort of diaphragm around each object, thus making the object’s relationship to the world appear as irrational and magical. As each new episode begins, the camera is already in motion using complicated movements. Frequently, however, these sinuous movements are brutally punctuated by a very simple documentary shot, like a quotation written in everyday language.[34]
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, film critic and co-founder of Cahiers du cinéma, felt that
"what La Dolce Vita lacks is the structure of a masterpiece. In fact, the film has no proper structure: it is a succession of cinematic moments, some more convincing than others… In the face of criticism, La Dolce Vita disintegrates, leaving behind little more than a sequence of events with no common denominator linking them into a meaningful whole".[35]
The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther praised Fellini’s
brilliantly graphic estimation of a whole swath of society in sad decay and, eventually, a withering commentary on the tragedy of the over-civilized… Fellini is nothing if not fertile, fierce and urbane in calculating the social scene around him and packing it onto the screen. He has an uncanny eye for finding the offbeat and grotesque incident, the gross and bizarre occurrence that exposes a glaring irony. He has, too, a splendid sense of balance and a deliciously sardonic wit that not only guided his cameras but also affected the writing of the script. In sum, it is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says.[36]
Roger Ebert considered La dolce vita as Fellini’s best film, as well as his favorite film of all, and listed it consistently in his top ten films for the Sight & Sound Greatest Films poll every ten years.[37][38][39] Ebert's first review for the film, published in October 1961, was nearly the first film review he wrote, before he began his career as a film critic in 1967.[40] The film was a touchstone for Ebert, as his perspective on the movie and his life evolved over time, summarized in his 1997 Great Movie review:
Movies do not change, but their viewers do. When I saw "La Dolce Vita" in 1960, I was an adolescent for whom "the sweet life" represented everything I dreamed of: sin, exotic European glamour, the weary romance of the cynical newspaperman. When I saw it again, around 1970, I was living in a version of Marcello's world; Chicago's North Avenue was not the Via Veneto, but at 3 a.m. the denizens were just as colorful, and I was about Marcello's age. When I saw the movie around 1980, Marcello was the same age, but I was 10 years older, had stopped drinking, and saw him not as a role model but as a victim, condemned to an endless search for happiness that could never be found, not that way. By 1991, when I analyzed the film a frame at a time at the University of Colorado, Marcello seemed younger still, and while I had once admired and then criticized him, now I pitied and loved him. And when I saw the movie right after Mastroianni died, I thought that Fellini and Marcello had taken a moment of discovery and made it immortal.[41]
Kevin Thomas of Los Angeles Times wrote
Federico Fellini’s 1960 “La Dolce Vita" is one of the key works of the modern cinema. A brilliantly conceived epic fable about a scandal reporter (Marcello Mastroianni) adrift in Rome’s high life, it introduced the term paparazzi into the vocabulary, and depicted, with a judicious mixture of satire and compassion, the glitter world of celebrity now avidly chronicled in supermarket tabloids.
Praising Fellini's direction he wrote
“La Dolce Vita” is also one of the triumphs of have-it-both-ways filmmaking: Fellini reveals the emptiness, boredom and destructiveness of the Via Veneto existence while at the same time making it highly glamorous and seductive...“La Dolce Vita” (Times-rated Mature for adult themes and situations) reminds us just how enduring and intuitively cinematic a storyteller Fellini is.[42]
Review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a 95% approval score based on 81 reviews, with an average rating of 9.10/10. The consensus states: "An epic, breathtakingly stylish cinematic landmark, La dolce vita remains riveting in spite of—or perhaps because of—its sprawling length".[43] On Metacritic, the film has a 95/100 rating based on 13 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[44]
Box office
The film was a big hit in Europe with 13,617,148 admissions in Italy and 2,956,094 admissions in France,[45] for a combined 16,573,242 tickets sold in both countries. The film had the second most admissions for an Italian film behind War and Peace and was one of the top 10 most watched films in Italy.
The film earned $6 million in rentals in the United States and Canada in its original release[46] and was the highest-grossing foreign language film at the US box office.[47] The film was re-released in North America in 1966 by American International Pictures and earned $1.5 million in rentals.[48] The total gross was $19,516,348.[49]
Censorship
Perceived by the Catholic Church as a parody of the second coming of Jesus, the opening scene and the film were condemned by the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano in 1960.[50] Subject to widespread censorship, the film was banned in Spain, until the death of Franco in 1975.[26] Umberto Tupini, the Minister of Culture of the Tambroni government censored it and other "shameful films". In Portugal, the film took ten years to pass through its censors and be released in the country (this was due to the censorship that the country suffered during the years of Estado Novo).
Awards and recognition
The New York Times described La dolce vita as "one of the most widely seen and acclaimed European movies of the 1960s".[51] It was nominated for four Academy Awards, and won one for Best Costume Design: Black-and-White. La dolce vita also earned the Palme d'Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.[4][52] The film won best foreign language film award at New York Film Critics Circle awards and National Board of Review awards. It was also nominated for a BAFTA award in best film from any source category.
Entertainment Weekly voted it the 6th Greatest film of all time in 1999.[53] The Village Voice ranked the film at number 112 in its Top 250 "Best Films of the Century" list in 1999, based on a poll of critics.[54] The film was included in "The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" in 2002.[55] In 2010, the film was ranked #11 in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema".[56] In the British Film Institute's 2002 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made, La dolce vita ranked 24th in critics' poll[57] and 14th in directors' poll.[58] In the 2012 version of the list La dolce vita ranked 39th in critics' poll and 37th in directors' poll. In January 2002, the film was voted at No. 28 on the list of the "Top 100 Essential Films of All Time" by the National Society of Film Critics.[59][60] The film was Voted at No. 59 on the list of "100 Greatest Films" by the prominent French magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 2008.[61] In 2007, the film was ranked at No. 19 by The Guardian's readers poll on the list of "40 greatest foreign films of all time".[62] In 2010, The Guardian ranked the film 23rd in its list of 25 greatest arthouse films.[63] In 2016, The Hollywood Reporter ranked the film 2nd among 69 counted winners of the Palme d'Or to date, concluding "What’s eternal is Fellini’s melancholy realization that behind modern-day sin, redemption, distraction and the come-hither facade of the sweet life, there lurks only emptiness."[64] The film ranked 10th in BBC's 2018 list of The 100 greatest foreign language films voted by 209 film critics from 43 countries around the world.[65] In 2021 the film was ranked at No. 6 on Time Out magazine's list of The 100 best movies of all time.[66]
