La Dolce Vita is not so much long as redundant. Scene duplicates scene; and scene after scene is protracted long after its every point has been unmistakably made. The trouble would seem to be that the film is conceived on a grand scale, but imagined only within rather narrow limitations. Fellini almost invariably extends all his scenes beyond every interest save the visual…. [A] negative compensation in all of this is in the proof it offers that the film is definitely more than a visual medium. (pp. 39-40)

There is nothing more beautiful or more terrible in La Dolce Vita than what is suggested by, and contained by implication in, its opening. It is a metaphor charged with meaning that the rest of the film strives in vain to equal.

Fellini seems unable, but is more likely unwilling, to accept this…. [When he] goes after the Big One...