La Dolce Vita

Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita won the Palme d'Or at Cannes 1960 and immediately became the most controversial Italian film of its decade, denounced by the Vatican, banned in Spain, condemned from pulpits across Catholic Europe. The 174-minute running time, the central blasphemy of opening with a helicoptered statue of Christ, and the sustained portrait of Roman aristocratic decadence all combined to produce an actual moral crisis in Italian public life. The phrase la dolce vita entered every European language, as did the word paparazzi, named for Marcello's tabloid-photographer companion.

Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni, again Fellini's perfect alter ego) is a celebrity gossip-columnist who drifts through seven nights of Roman high society, a celebrity arrival at Ciampino airport, an aristocratic orgy, the Trevi Fountain bathe with Anita Ekberg's Sylvia, the death of his intellectual friend Steiner, the dawn-on-the-beach finale. Each night is structured as a movement; the film operates more as fresco than as narrative. Otello Martelli's wide black-and-white cinematography and Nino Rota's score are inseparable from the result.

The film is the rare work routinely placed both in Sight & Sound's top tier and in popular cinematic memory, Ekberg in the Fontana di Trevi is one of the most-imitated images in cinema history. Its critique of celebrity culture has only sharpened.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that defined post-war Italian glamour, then exposed it, then was canonised for both. A masterclass in how cinema can be sympathetic and damning at once.