8½

Federico Fellini made 8½ in 1963, four years after La Dolce Vita, and the film became immediately the work that defined what an art-cinema autobiography could be. The title refers to Fellini's accounting of his own filmography, six features, two short films counted as halves, plus the present effort. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Costume Design, and has sat in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound critics' poll since.

Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni, Fellini's perfect alter ego) is a celebrated Italian director arrested by creative paralysis in the middle of preparing his next film at a spa town. Producers, journalists, his neglected wife Luisa (Anouk Aimée), his shallow mistress Carla, and the imagined ideal-woman Claudia (Claudia Cardinale) circle him, while childhood memories, fantasies of a harem, and the half-built sci-fi rocket-launch set he can no longer summon enthusiasm for collide. Nino Rota's score is among the most enduring in cinema. Gianni Di Venanzo's wide-frame black-and-white photography frames the lot.

Almost every later film about creative block (from All That Jazz to Synecdoche, New York) operates within the form Fellini established here. 8½ is also the rare canonical masterwork that is genuinely funny, joyously cruel about its own milieu, and finally consoling in its closing dance.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The greatest film about making films, and the one that proved the autobiographical confession could be cinema's most generous form rather than its most narcissistic. The closing circus is among the most exhilarating endings in the medium.