[Juliet of the Spirits] is specious and hollow, in addition to being very boring; and its failures bring into focus what has been bothering me about Fellini's more celebrated successes: they are indebted less to true perception than to carnival showmanship….

In La Dolce Vita Fellini revealed himself to be deeply attracted by the very things he was pretending to ridicule or expose (upper-class orgies, intellectual parties, Catholic ritual and pageantry, Anika Ekberg's chest); and in "8 1/2" he dropped the mask of impersonality entirely, initiating some superficial explorations of the unconscious which, for all their disarming self-irony and technical dazzle, seemed to me little more than a cinematic acting out of his own autoerotic fantasies, resolved by an outrageously dishonest conclusion. In Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's artistic flashiness and moral ambiguity are even more conspicuous; and while the fantasies he invents are now supposed to belong to a...