“8½ has always been a touchstone for me, in so many ways,” the director Martin Scorsese has said of Federico Fellini’s film about a filmmaker, “the freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions.” Perhaps most identified with that symbol of Italian culture—La Dolce Vita (1960)—Fellini released 8½ three years later. The movie “offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment,” Scorsese explains, “trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself.” The masterpiece is on view at Film Forum through May 8, so if you haven’t seen Fellini’s groundbreaking baroque style on a big screen, now’s your chance. —Carolina de Armas