Rating: 
Summary: A magical film, the very best of Fellini!
Review: ROMA is a total treat of a movie. Rather than a continuous, plotted narative, it provides vignettes of "typical" Roman life. For my mind, it provides some of the strongest images ever filmed. Highlights include a totally irreverent ecclesiastical fashion show that is not to be missed, and a journey into an archaeological treasure beneath the streets of Rome. It features traffic, life during World War II, apartment life, eating, and delightful visits to the red light district.This isn't a film for children. It IS a film you simply must see!
Rating:
Summary: I am missing it
Review: Saw this movie as a 16 year old youngster and was so impressed. Now, 25 years later, and after having spent much time in this town, I am trying to find it on video, but it is nowhere available.
Rating: 
Summary: fellinis very good flick
Review: the best movei that fedrericiko fellinins has ever made! it oprestnts rome in a glorious way. it msakeds me want to vitsi there one day. everything else he makes was bad. but i never tire of watvching this film. don't watch 8 or satyricon. this is the best one! only good foreing movie that was ever made. and i hate thesdes types of flick. but this is a great one with great acting,great scrpit and a greast cast of charxcetsrs. a jem!
Rating:
Summary: Didn't live up to my expectations
Review: The first Fellini film I ever saw really made me sit up and notice-- the "Toby Dammit" segment of "Spirits of the Dead" (the rest of which is pretty forgettable). Nothing else I've seen of his lived up to my expectations after that-- I still think it's his best work. And the Nino Rota soundtrack of Toby Dammit is one of Nino's best as well. Later saw La Strada, and thought it was OK, but didn't have the surrealist-grotesque factor I loved so much in Toby Dammit. Heard the Juliet of the Spirits soundtrack, and it's one of my favorite Nino Rota disks, but I found it hard to get interested with the movie. I then looked into what he shot nearest to the time he did Toby Dammit, and it looked like Roma might be a good choice. While the papal fashion show is truly great, none of the rest of it was anywhere near as jaw-dropping as Toby Dammit-- even the motorcycle tour at the end of Roma wasn't nearly as good as the similar nighttime Ferrari tour through Rome at the end of Toby Dammit.
So Roma for me, didn't do it. I haven't given up though, still hoping for something that even comes near the perfect surreal-grotesque-ness of Toby Dammit-- I'm planning on eventually checking out Amarcord, The Ship Sails On, La Dolce Vita, 8-1/2 and probably Nights of Cabria, and wish The Clowns and even Casanova (great soundtrack, anyway) would make it to DVD, but I'm no longer expecting quite as much as I see more and more of his work-- methinks I may have started at the peak...
Rating:
Summary: If there is anything to be called a masterpiece, this is it.
Review: Watching this movie is like walking in a museum, reading a dozen of amazing novels, being in a theater, travelling to Rome, in space and time. Most importantly, it's a lot of fun and mystery, as life is itself. Also, movie in a movie has rarely been done so well. And finally, Roma makes you wander if you really need to spend $100mln to create a visual feast. Few hints: watch it in a company of friends, make it a cinema experience (watch it in its entiriety), organise good sound system and big screen, and don't do it too late so you've got time to discuss it with friends. P.S. let me know if it worked.
Rating:
Summary: 2757 (Ab Urbe Condita)
Review: Would "Caligula" or "Nero" be shocked at what their city, the Eternal City, the City to which all roads once led, has become so many years into the distant future? Or would they (probably more likely) find a way to fit right in somehow? This is one of the "notions" that I found myself pondering as I watched this movie. It really is a great movie, and it is certainly worth any true film fan's time. I may have even liked (some of it at least) better than (again, "some of") La Dolce Vita.
Having grown up in a very Italian family - with my father having been born in a "pagliarone" ( roughly, a slang dialect term meaning "stone hut") in an ancient and very rural village probably not much unlike the one Fellini's main character ventures out to Rome from - I myself was definitely "right at home" , so to speak, watching scenes like the famous "dinner on the piazza". (Personally I could watch that scene again and again and not get tired of it, but...maybe it is "an Italian thing", so to speak, and others would not find it so amusing). However there certainly is no dearth of general humor to be found in the antics of the wild cast of characters which Fellini always brings into his films. And Roma of course is no exception to this. For example, the bedridden obese old woman in a hairnet, who owns the building that he stays in in Rome when he first arrives there, who tells him, "now let's just live in peace and not bust each other's balls"! Or the bald old man who does a rather convincing Mussolini impersonation. My personal favorite though would probably be either the ultra-tanned would-be "Continental" kind of guy who approaches the female American tourist telling her, "You VERY bella" and offering to take her picture, OR the guy in the piazza scene (which is supposed to have taken place some thirty years prior to that) who was wearing one of those nylon "do-rags" that rap stars favor today, and yelling up to his dark, beautiful brooding girlfriend to get down to the piazza before he beats the hell out of her ... "again". Sure, these are walking stereotypes, these characters, and negative ones at that. But, as they say, there is a kernel of truth (at least) in all stereotypes is there not? For instance that "dinner on the piazza" scene that I mentioned before? It does perhaps resemble some sort of "prototypical" summer-night-in-Bensonhurst, or somewhere like that, with plenty of gold chains, "dago-t's", and "pane e vino" to go around.
On a more serious note however the most touching scene (and this is a point that is usually generally agreed upon, I think, by most of the movie's fans) is the scene of the sudden (and apparently accidental) destruction of the ancient Roman frescoes by the modern Roman work-crew. Obviously this is Fellini's artistic "condemnation" , if you will, of the massive industrialization of the City in modern times, and the (clearly potentially disastrous) effects of what we may call the "godless modern" encountering the ancient and sacred. Cruel and loud machinery encountering the long-buried, the "resting-in-peace", the, once again, "sacred". It is in a way akin to some of the imagery in the much newer film called Fahrenheit 9/11. There we see American tanks and fighter jets turning up the sand with shells and bombs, and setting fires and explosions, in the very "Cradle of Civilization", the land of the very first codified and written-out system of law and order. Such imagery, like Fellini's vision of the vanishing ancient frescoes, is so evocative it can truly make the viewer want to weep.
Athough Roma has improved much since Fellini filmed it back in 1972 ( I just left there myself a couple of months ago so I can say this is definitely so), in this film, during the time that he is showing it to us, the City appears to be delusional, vaguely delirious with fever perhaps, or in the throes of a restless night full of tossings-and-turnings and wild "half-waking" dreams. It is these dreams which are in fact the "images" and "vignettes" that Fellini shows to us throughout the film.
Overall, in comparison with the (mostly) worthless garbage that is cluttering the racks at your local neighborhood video rental store, this film (ANY of Fellini's films for that matter) would certainly be much more rewarding for the would-be connoisseur of truly good movies to pick up and take home tonight.
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