[Satyricon] starts where Giulietta degli Spiriti left off, moving wholly into a world of dreams and visions, bigger and more bizarre even than the highly-coloured fantasies of Giulietta in full flight. The result should be impossible, utterly indigestible, but paradoxically it is not: one adjusts rapidly to accepting the extreme ornateness of the action (what is going on in front of the camera much more than how the camera records it) as a sort of norm, so that effects which even in Giulietta would have drawn attention to themselves as extraordinary and exceptional here seem hardly more remarkable in themselves than a dead metaphor in everyday speech….

Charm and grace are not particularly Fellinian qualities, and the last thing he ever is is a sophisticate. In a way this is his greatest strength. In all his films, though particularly of course those from La Dolce Vita on, it is the sheer spate of ideas that pours from him and on to the screen, like a force of nature, which silences criticism if anything can. Of discretion, good taste, or anything namby-pamby like that, he knows and cares nothing.

Especially in Satyricon. For the light and good humour of Petronius he substitutes something dark, menacing, lit at best with flames of hellish fire from some John Martin vision of cosmic disaster in the ancient world. Hardly any of Fellini's Satyricon is actually funny; it is instead a sort of nightmare vision of a civilisation on its last legs, over-rich, over-ripe, decorating its surfaces with a neurotic elaboration because form has come to be the only consideration, and what the form should express counts for nothing….

8 1/2 is a work which shows Fellini's creative imagination working at maximum intensity. Its greatest effect lies in a paradox of which, one suspects, Fellini was hardly aware while he was making it: that while it is about the mind at the end of its tether, the imagination exhausted and impotent, the film he has made on this subject is full of imagination exuberantly and fruitfully at play. Giulietta is a work of fancy rather than imagination, if we may try to preserve the Coleridgian distinction: lighter, slighter, less deeply involved or involving, it frolics pleasurably with and on parts of Fellini's regular mental furniture. What Satyricon does is to return yet again to these materials, but now using them in such a way that they contain a built-in criticism of themselves. The spate of invention is still there, but it is no longer joyful. Its effect in Giulietta is sometimes smothering, suffocating, where one senses it was not meant to be. Here, even as one is battered and weighed down by the sheer accumulation of detail, one can recognise it as part of Fellini's intention that one should be. (p. 217)

[The] film does, though sometimes by a very narrow margin, function as a work of art, recreating effects rather than reproducing them. It even achieves that most difficult of feats, conveying boredom without actually boring…. We are not touched by the characters, we do not care at all about their fate …, the characters are simply part of the overall pattern, and it is the pattern which works on us if anything does.

As with all Fellini's later, more confessional films, I suspect that Satyricon is a film you have to succumb to completely, live along with for more than two hours and accept the discomforts as well as the insights involved in seeing things as Fellini sees them, if it is to work at all. But for those who can let it work on them, Fellini's journey to the end of night is a chastening and, surprisingly enough, an elevating experience. (p. 218)