Amarcord Still Sentimental, Sexist ... and Great

“Kids, dogs, wisecracking old men and well-proportioned female derrières take up a significant portion of screen time in Amarcord,” writes Andrew O’Hehir in Salon of the newly re-released, semi-autobiographical coming-of-age tale from Federico Fellini—but it doesn’t lack gravitas. The color restoration is as “eye-popping” as the topless scene that brings Titta, the desperately horny teenage boy, “up close and personal with the bodacious town tobacconist.”

From Fellini we get “what he loved and what he hated about the provincial Italian character”—he skewers Mussolini and the fascism sweeping up the seaside town of Rimini. “He always understood,” writes O’Hehir, “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.” (More Frederico Fellini stories.)