Love him, hate him, or both, Damian Pettigrew’s diffuse and hagiographic documentary will only confirm opinions and change no minds about Federico Fellini. Consisting of a meandering interview with the maestro (it was conducted shortly before his death, in 1993) punctuated with an odd assortment of film clips, unlikely talking heads (ranging from Italo Calvino to Roberto Benigni, both, in their own way, unhelpful), and shots of Fellini’s home town of Rimini, it adds little to the debate about the filmmaker’s lasting value. Was he a visionary fabulist, as his own ramblings about the transcendence of his invented solipsistic universe indicate? An egomaniacal "martinet," as Donald Sutherland recalls from his first weeks of shooting Casanova (1976), an observation confirmed by shots of Fellini directing a love scene with obsessive and lascivious detail? An overrated, sophomoric sentimentalist with a flair for the grotesque, as many of the clips, dating badly, suggest?

Maybe the most revelatory interviewee is Benigni, who appeared in Fellini’s last film, The Voice of the Moon (1990) — not because of anything he says, but because of the implied contrast. Certainly Benigni can be accused of many of Fellini’s flaws — mawkishness, superficiality, self-indulgence. But compare, say, I vitelloni (1953) and Otto e mezzo/8-1/2 (1963) with Johnny Stecchino (1991) and La vita è bella (1997) and you’ll understand why some consider Fellini a genius. In English and Italian with English subtitles. (105 minutes)