Rating: 
Summary: Overrated!
Review: This film is long, aimless, absurd, and boring. Twenty minutes into it, you'll be wanting it to end. Many praise Fellini's innovative approach to making a film of a fragmented story, and for it's sumptuous production values, but it doesn't help the fact that this film just bites! I love foreign films, but this was a huge disappointment, and totally overrated. As for Fellini, all the innovation in the world doesn't save a mind-numbingly boring film!
Rating: 
Summary: Pretty Much your Usual Fellini...
Review: This film offers visually arresting images, set in an incoherent pastiche. Forget about the linear mode here (as so often with this director). Fellini has a wonderful eye for faces and for grotesqueries. He has a strong sense of the dark and the compelling. These strengths are attended to in his Satyricon. Fellini sometimes tends to work in fragments, without form or guiding direction. Don't look for plot in much of Fellini, and certainly not in his Satyricon. Those of us uncomfortable without straightforward plots will be uncomfortable with the Satyricon. The movie's major strengths lie in the arresting vignettes of a Roman empire coming apart and jaded in its indulgences. There are historical truths hinted at here. But do NOT look for a coherent plot.
Rating:
Summary: Could have been a better transfer
Review: This movie does not need my praises. It's simply a must for its depiction of an exhuberantly ironic if amoral way of living as well as some of the most arresting images ever put on film. It should have received 5 stars. I rated it 3 because it does not appear that the transfer to DVD was from a pristine negative.... there is more detail than the VHS,of course, and it's in Italian, not English-dubbed, but if they are going to reissue a film like this, they could have gone the full mile. I hope that when they get to 8 1/2 they do..... in fact, I hope Criterion and not MGM puts it out.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointment
Review: This movie made a tremendous impact when it first appeared, and Fellini was hailed as a great cinematic genius. Unfortunately, the movie hasn't aged well. Today, 30 years later, this montage of weird scenes and even weirder-looking people resembles nothing so much as escapees from a low-budget version of Star Wars. Some of the scenes are mildly entertaining, but even the ones that are tend to drag on too long, and many scenes I found so laughably bad that I was frankly amazed that anyone could have been thought a cinematic genius for coming up with them. The obsession with various sexual proclivities does add to the weirdness factor but it's not enough to redeem the film, either. Anybody with the slightest familiarity with ancient Rome won't find any of this that interesting, surprising or shocking, although Fellini tries hard to make it so. Worst of all, I was only able to sit through about half of the movie, and then I finally gave up on it. For me, that's saying something. I'm normally not that critical of movies and am usually quite easily entertained, and the number of movies I've had to do that with can be counted on the fingers of one hand. And the only reason I stayed with it that long was that I kept expecting it to turn into the brilliant movie I'd heard and read about, if I just made it to the next scene. Perhaps I was expecting too much because I'd been hearing most of my life about what an intellectual masterpiece it was. And I'd read most of the other reviews here before renting it, most of which raved about the movie. Now that I've seen it, I can't imagine why, except that perhaps they were so impressed with Fellini's reputation that they couldn't really objectively see the film for what it is, which, at best, is a pretty silly piece of work, and not a profound cinematic masterpiece at all. And at the worst? Well, I can't think of anything that would be printable here, except that I think I could have done just as good a job making up silly scenes such as these, and I have no reason to think I have any talent as a movie maker. After seeing the movie, I think it's fair to say neither does Fellini, except I've never seen any of his other movies. Fellini himself once said that he has nothing to say. After seeing the movie, I think he has considerably less than nothing to say. To be completely fair, since I haven't seen any of his other flicks, I will try at least one more of his other movies, perhaps 8 1/2, and see if things improve. They have to, since he has nowhere to go but up. I hope. But getting back to the Satyricon, maybe somebody will do a satire or spoof on this movie someday, because it's begging for it, and at least at that point it would have served some useful purpose. You could use the original Conehead characters from Saturday Night Live and call it the "Satyricone." At least it would have been funny, instead of the boring, pretentious movie it turned out to be, which attempts to impress and shock people with its portrayal of decadent Roman court life during Nero's reign but succeeds only in creating a falsely weird gravitas that amounts to basically nothing more than a cinematic tempest in a teapot--a big nothing. As the ancient Romans would have said, give this movie the "digitus impudicus." Or as Nero himself might have said, "I'll burn this lousy movie along with the city." Well, I guess you can tell I didn't like the movie. And my review isn't even the most negative one. Two other reviewers here said it was so bad they wanted to commit suicide. Well, obviously they are probably exaggerating a little, but I'm not exaggerating when I say this is an amazingly, astoundingly, incredibly and unredeemably bad piece of work. You might want to see the picture just because of the historical importance of the film, but don't expect much more than that.
Rating:
Summary: This movie is terrible
Review: This was the first and the last Fellini movie I will ever purchase. The movie is totally incoherant. I do not see what is so compelling about this movie. It was a waste of my time.
Rating: 
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: What can you say? 30 years on, and the film is being transferred to DVD. Thank goodness! Among many other things, this is a surrealistic vision of the rampant bisexuality of the old days in Rome. The other reviewers (so far) have pretty much shied away from the abundant love affairs portrayed between men of all sorts (the two main heroes, both drop-dead handsome, the two main heroes with the lissom lad Giton, the two heroes with a giggling servant girl found in the house of the noble Roman who has just committed suicide with his wife...and on and on and on). This film will definitely arouse discomfort among those who actually believe that man was made for one monogamous relationship with a female in a lifetime. :-P The vanity and vulgarity of Trimalchio are splendidly portrayed, the bloodthirsty cruelty of the Romans is right there for all to see. It is a splendid effort at recovering human history through re-imagination. This film needs no praises from me. It's going to have a very long life -- heck, it already has had a very long life! Highest recommendation! The book is good, too!
Rating:
Summary: The Ultimate Pot Smoker's Movie?
Review: When I saw this film 30 years ago as a very young man, I found it tedious and boring for stretches and then I would get drawn back into its vivid, expressive, delightful/repulsive images and surreal structure. There were flashes of wit and dreamlike moments of nostalgia and beauty and longing. The film succeeded in causing me to feel as though I had been transported back in time. I still remember some of the dreamlike images and the amazement and delight and/or revulsion I felt. It was the slowest, most meandering, most intensely visual film I can recall. At the time, in San Francisco (cc: 1970), the film had the reputation of being the ultimate film to view while stoned on grass. Indeed the potheads of that city were convinced that Fellini had made the film expressly with them in mind.
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