Amarcord

Federico Fellini's Amarcord opened in 1973 and won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1975. The title is Romagnol dialect for "I remember", and the film is a loose recollection of Fellini's own childhood in Rimini in the early 1930s, built as a year of episodic vignettes instead of a conventional narrative. It sits permanently in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll, and it is the most generous-spirited of all Fellini's later films.

It follows the adolescent Titta (Bruno Zanin) and his family on the Adriatic coast through one year of fascist 1930s Italy: the spring rite of burning the witch on the bonfire, the voluptuous Gradisca (Magali Noël) sweeping through every male fantasy in the town, the SS Rex sailing past the local fishing boats. Pupella Maggio plays Titta's mother and Armando Brancia his unstable father. Ciccio Ingrassia is the lunatic uncle whose one great scene, in which he climbs a tree and refuses to come down, is among the most famous in all of Fellini.

Nino Rota's score, Giuseppe Rotunno's cinematography and Danilo Donati's costumes and production design make it one of the most sumptuously realised period reconstructions in European cinema. It is a childhood memoir and a broad satire of the fascist years, and it treats small-town life as a kind of theatrical performance in which everyone has a part. Of all late Fellini, Amarcord is the film general audiences love most.