La Strada
As <PERSON> got further from neorealism, he began to indulge more in Freudian histrionics and satirize Italian society in a way that, as in Amarcord never quite packs enough critique with its sentiment, even as it flattens its depictions to the level of farce. La Strada is something of the sweet spot, I think; it has more personality and originality than I <PERSON>, more pathos than the broad satires that follow, a farce that feels genuinely consequential, and a nice gambit in shifting focus from <PERSON> to Zampanò at the end. I think <PERSON> tends to shoehorn Catholicism and redemption into his films in ways that are perhaps organic to the Italy he grew up in but are never thematically effective or convincing; that's still the case to some degree here, but it's much less of a problem than in many of his other films. 378