Former choreographer Rob Marshall’s third directorial effort, a restaging of the Broadway musical based on Fellini’s 8½. In essence the filmmaker has taken an intensely personal film (so named as it was Fellini’s eighth and a half opus, counting three collaborations as halves) and depersonalized it, trivialized it, into nostalgic cinephilia circa the mid-Sixties and secondarily into generic Italophilia, the cultural divide highlighted by a principal cast of non-Italians, Daniel Day-Lewis as the Fellini figure, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Judi Dench, pop singer Fergie, excepting only Sophia Loren, not all of them pretending to be Italians. Each gets to perform at least one would-be showstopper. Cruz (dubbed? — it scarcely matters in her scanties) and Fergie come closest to attainment of that goal, and Cotillard outside of her would-be showstopper attains a loftier goal of tangible humanity. Somehow the notion of a Broadway show of this origin seems less objectionable because it’s in a different medium and not in direct competition. Dion Beebe’s rich ripe cinematography is commendable on its own merits when not dipping into directly competitive black-and-white. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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