In the past week or so we’ve seen the arrival of trailers for Captain America: Civil War, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, X-Men: Apocalypse, Independence Day: Resurgence, and Star Trek: Beyond. What these movies have in common of course – aside from an unhealthy reliance on colons and secondary titles – is that they’re all big-budget sci-fi movies that the various studios/prodcution companies behind them hope will bring in enough moolah at the box office to keep them going for another year (or more). They’re also sequels, and while we all know that familiarity breeds bums on seats, it also breeds laziness, and reconfirms that old phrase about the law of diminishing returns.

So in the period when it seems as if every potential tentpole movie of 2016 (and the TMNT movie) has been revealed to the public at large, it’s a relief to see a movie trailer that doesn’t rely on vast action sequences, characters in costume, or an in-built audience who’ll go however good or bad a movie is as long as they can release their inner geek for a couple of hours. The movie in question is also a re-release, and from 1980 at that. (Hey, this post is going from bad to worse!) But it’s also a movie by Federico Fellini, an amazing visual cornucopia exploring the nature of women and Fellini’s continuing fascination with them. It’s one of those movies that has to be seen to be fully appreciated, a dazzling, lunatic, magic carpet ride of sexual mores, confused male desire (as represented by Marcello Mastroianni), and satirical jamborees through the post-punk culture expressing itself in Italy at the time. City of Women is being re-released following a 2k restoration, and will never have looked as good as it does now, which is reason enough to see it, but it’s also Fellini, and while he did make some movies that didn’t work on their own terms, this is not one of them. See it if you can.