Amarcord may be the director's warmest, most subdued film (who goes to Fellini for warmth and good nature?), but it is also his safest. I miss the grand flourishes, the master showmanship, the epic heightening, that I've come to expect from Fellini. Amarcord lacks the vigor and drive, the joyous high spirits and sense of release that have been for me the chief pleasures of Fellini's work….

Amarcord is a trimming away, a paring down, rather than a return to the style of his earliest films…. Fellini has always shown impatience with strict realism. Rather than objectively recording the surfaces of Italian life, he always worked from personal predilections that hardened into obsessions. (p. 50)

Amarcord, like all of Fellini's work, far from being a "return" or a "departure," is a blend of the real and the fanciful—it's a distinctly stylized version of Italian life. This time, though, Fellini has avoided a circus atmosphere; the film isn't the collection of breathtaking tableaux that is, for me, the essential Fellini. He has deliberately simplified his canvas, but he hasn't substituted anything in place of the intoxications of his previous work….

Fellini doesn't impose himself on the material to the degree he has in his most recent films, but he hasn't found anyone else to guide us through the film's fragmented panorama. The point of view is shifting, confused. (p. 51)

Fellini keeps us away from all his characters. His main family, who are the anchor and focus for the anecdotes, are simply stage Italians, comic opera buffoons who conform to facile preconceptions about what Italians are like: they're hot-tempered, warm-hearted, they gesture extravagantly. We're encouraged to laugh at their squabbles, and then, when the mother dies unexpectedly, we're to be moved by their vulnerability. The pathos is unearned.

The townspeople consist of the usual Fellini dramatis personae, only the types this time are less vivid and exact. (pp. 51-2)

As a treatment of adolescence, the film is ordinary. Sexual initiation is mined for conventional comedy. As a chronicle of a town, the film is surprisingly flavorless….

The composition is deliberately unstructured, nonpictorial, but it's also unimpressive—there's nothing to hold on to. The finale completely lacks the sense of communion or the joyous resolution or the formal beauty which have marked every one of the director's previous endings. Easy, likable, filled with flashes of charm, Amarcord is Fellini's thinnest performance. (p. 52)