MikePadgett.com

Such was the headline at the El Pais website this morning.

There can be little doubt that Spain was consistently the best team on the field in Euro 2008, playing their entertaining brand of fútbol total.

In a thrilling climax to a tournament full of surprises - exciting turns from Russia and Croatia, spectacular deadline management from Turkey, Germany actually reaching the final - the crowning Spanish success spelled the end of a forty four year drought of major championship titles.

Perhaps this is also a changing of the guard at the head of European football. Whilst Italy and Germany both looked stale, the Dutch failed to live up to early expectations and France, bof, il vaut mieux ne rien dire.

Better for football, better for Europe.

• Director: Sergio Leone
• Italy/US, 1968
• 

A single set on Once Upon A Time cost as much as the entire production on one of Sergio Leone’s previous films. Certainly the director made full use of big studio backing to deliver his vision, one of cinema’s most bewitching and monumental works and the death of the western genre (which has had nothing useful to add since).

Leone’s masterstrokes are many: mixing together all the great colours of the cinematic West to create something new and powerful; moulding a strong female into the pivotal role (against his own better judgment); painting Hollywood hero Henry Fonda in a new and frightening shade of evil.

It’s also a brave film: the long, excruciatingly tense opening sequence and the slow burning plot will doubtless have turned some off. Yet even if this film didn’t set the US box office on fire, it was still arguably the finest achievement of Leone’s oeuvre, a justly revered classic the world over.

• Director: Federico Fellini
• Italy, 1960
• 

Something about Fellini’s films always leaves me cold. They’re literate, exquisitely shot and intensely artistic. But ultimately I never seem to get on with them.

La Dolce Vita is an iconic classic, one of Fellini’s brightest pearls in a whole string of them. It charts the path of Marcello Rubini, a journalist who aspires to greater things but cannot escape his fascination for the lifestyles of Rome’s playboys and girls. And on the way, the images are indelible: a statue of Christ airlifted over the city by helicopter, Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Fontana Di Trevi, the strangely sad cabaret.

I ought to love this movie. The satire’s so powerful that one character’s name has become part of our language. But as with 8½ it just feels empty. A spectacle for the sake of a spectacle. A beautiful tableau minus a fitting caption.