3. 8 1/2
What's more pretentious than a movie made by a man, for a man, and about a man who thinks his movies are too pretentious? Federico Fellini made this self-deprecating movie about a movie director who knows he's full of it. He's a man in love with women who love him. And while he can't get enough, it's all too much. Fellini thought he would shatter his own image by immortalising it in a semi-autobiographical, surrealist film from the perspective of a man who escapes the obstacles of film making by retreating into fantasies and memories. The end result of Fellini's efforts is a masturbatory piece enshrined by his contemporaries and subsequent auteurs alike. Finally, a man who captures our plight! What we're left with is a classic, espoused by film experts as one of the essential films that caters myopically to straight male film directors and leaves pretty much everyone else wheezing and teary-eyed in their self-satisfactory dust.