Italian director Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (or "The Sweet Life") was released in 1960. Set across seven days and nights and in Rome, Italy, La Dolce Vita follows a young man named Marcello Rubini. Disillusioned with his life, Marcello walks through the "sweet life" (as the film's title suggests) of Rome so that he can find love and happiness and fulfillment. The film is divided into seven days, or seven separate episodes. Many consider the film to be a mosaic; it is a film about wealth and the disparity of wealth between rich and poor. It is also a film about sex and sexuality, success, the media, and many other themes.
To many, La Dolce Vita shined a bright light on Italian cinema into the mainstream. It also catapulted Fellini's career into the proverbial stratosphere. La Dolce Vita itself is considered a masterpiece and was nominated for four Oscars (including Best Costumes, which it won, Best Director for Fellini, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Screenplay), a rarity for a foreign language film at the time. At the time, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther gave the film a glowing review. He wrote that Fellini's film is "brilliant" and "is nothing if not fertile, fierce and urbane in calculating the social scene around him and packing it onto the screen." Crowther also wrote that, "In sum, [La Dolce Vita] is an awesome picture, licentious in content but moral and vastly sophisticated in its attitude and what it says."
