Federico Fellini describes his "Fellini Satyricon" as a science-fiction film, but one in which we journey to the past rather than to the future. Directors are notoriously unreliable as sources of opinions about their own movies, but in this case I think Fellini is dead right.

His film is a fantastical journey to a pre-Christian Rome that resembles no civilization that ever was, in heaven or on Earth. And it is a masterpiece. Some will say it is a bloody, depraved, disgusting film; indeed, people by the dozens were escaping from the sneak preview I attended. But "Fellini Satyricon" is a masterpiece all the same, and films that dare everything cannot please everybody.

This time, Fellini invites us into his own mind. He makes no attempt to tell a story, although he succeeds in telling several. He makes no attempt to be lucid, or philosophical, or to make sense. At last we are allowed to look beneath the surface of films like "La Dolce Vita" and "Juliet of the Spirits," and to glimpse the horrible underworld that lurks down there.

Lurking under the stories of his 1960s movies, there seemed to be something frightening that was not rational at all. "Fellini Satyricon" is that lower region; it is the nightmare shared by all the haunted characters in his earlier films, by Marcello, by Juliet, especially by Steiner.

Excerpt of Roger Ebert's review at the Chicago Sun Times located HERE

DVD Release Date: April 28, 2003
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