Blu-ray, DVD Release: Roma

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 13, 2016
Price: DVD $22.99, Blu-ray $27.99
Studio: Criterion


Travelogue, memoir, and outrageous cinematic spectacle converge in Federico Fellini’s (La Dolce Vita) 1972 comedy-drama Roma, a kaleidoscopic valentine to the Eternal City, composed by one of its most iconic inhabitants.

felliniroma1Leisurely one moment and breathless the next, Fellini’s urban fantasia interweaves recollections of the director’s young adulthood in the era of Mussolini with an impressionistic portrait of contemporary Rome, where he and his film crew are gathering footage of the bustling cityscape. The material delights of sex, food, nightlife, and one hallucinatory ecclesiastical fashion show are shot through with glimmers of a monumental past: the Colosseum encircled by traffic, ancient frescoes unearthed in a subway tunnel, a pigeon-befouled statue of Caesar.

With a head-spinning mix of documentary immediacy and extravagant artifice, Roma penetrates the myth and mystique of Italy’s storied capital, a city Fellini called “the most wonderful movie set in the world.”

Presented in Italian with English subtitles, Criterion’s DVD and Blu-ray editions of the movie contain the following:

  • New high-definition digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • Audio commentary featuring Frank Burke, author of Fellini’s Films
  • Deleted scenes
  • New interview with filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino on the lasting influence of director Federico Fellini
  • New interview with Italian poet and Fellini friend Valerio Magrelli
  • Images from the Felliniana archive of collector Don Young
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • An essay by film scholar David Forgacs
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About Laurence

Founder and editor Laurence Lerman saw Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest when he was 13 years old and that’s all it took. He has been writing about film and video for more than a quarter of a century for magazines, anthologies, websites and most recently, Video Business magazine, where he served as the Reviews Editor for 15 years.