Federico Fellini, R I P.

SOME ARTISTS are their own most effective critics. Algernon Charles Swinburue wrote some cruel parodies of himself, and some even crueler parodies when he was trying to write in earnest. Yet his impressive poems survive. So it was with Federico Fellini. He inspired an adjective "Felliniesque"--suggesting ornate fantasies, often grotesque. We could have done with fewer of them.

But in the great Fellini movies--Nights of Cabiria, Juliet of the Spirits--fancy was disciplined by Fellini's attention to the dilemmas of a character in crisis, while in his greatest, La Dolce Vita, he managed something even further--to capture the glamor of a way of life that was, at the same time, ultimately stifling. Fellini commemorated this achievement in a segment of his last movie to be released here, Intervista, in which Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, both aged, watch a clip of their younger selves from La Dolce Vita, dancing in the Trevi fountain: a moment that was not self-parody, but a moving, and justified, salute to the two stars, and to the man who captured them so memorably.