FELLINI MINI-FESTIVAL

While the Italian Cultural Center's festival of contemporary Italian cinema unspools this weekend at Minneapolis College of Art and Design (see www.theitalianculturalcenter.org for details), there's a Fellini festival across town. Tonight through Sunday it's "La Dolce Vita," one of the most widely seen and hailed films of the past half-century or so. With its tour of alluring but decadent life among Rome's glittering upper crust, the film is an arch, cynical masterpiece of social commentary and a sophisticated work of art. Marcello Mastroianni plays an improbably glamorous tabloid journalist through whom we encounter bombshell actresses, religious mania, orgiastic evenings, lonely mornings and personal tragedy. Next weekend it's "I Vitelloni," "Amarcord" the weekend following, and at month's end "8 �." (All films run Fri.-Sun. in Italian with English subtitles. $8, www.take-up.org, 612-424-5468, Trylon Microcinema, 3258 Minnehaha Av. S., Mpls.)

Colin Covert