Lucrecia Martel's La Niña Santa ("The Holy Girl"), from her own screenplay, slithers along as a highly controlled sex comedy that is unusually civilized in comparison to the more prevalent crudities in movies these days. With her first two films (the first was 2001's La...

[Luci del Varieta is the first real Fellini film.] It is so, obviously, in the subject-matter: the faded underside of show-business, the gaudy, tawdry, improvised world of one-night stands and not knowing where the next meal is coming from. Here Fellini is speaking from his own experience of people he has known…. What makes it a film which no one but Fellini could have invented (both conceived, that is, and put on the screen) may perhaps best be illustrated not by generalities but by studying two par...