Reviews - Life Is Beautiful (1997)

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Taglines: An unforgettable fable that proves love, family and imagination conquer all.

Writers: Vincenzo Cerami, Roberto Benigni

Stars: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini, Giustino Durano, ...

In 1930s Italy, a carefree Jewish book keeper named Guido starts a fairy tale life by courting and marrying a lovely woman from a nearby city. Guido and his wife have a son and live happily together until the occupation of Italy by German forces. In an attempt to hold his family together and help his son survive the horrors of a Jewish Concentration Camp, Guido imagines that the Holocaust is a game and that the grand prize for winning is a tank.

100

Benigni, with great help from young Cantarini, has crafted a work of such complexity that you may find both your brain and your heart simply overloaded. Which, of course, is the rarely achieved goal of all art.

100 | Michael Wilmington

A deeply moving blend of cold terror and rapturous hilarity. Lovingly crafted by Italy's top comedian and most popular filmmaker, it's that rare comedy that takes on a daring and ambitious subject and proves worthy of it.

100 | Shawn Levy

One of the greatest films about the civilian experience of war ever made anywhere.

88 | Mike Clark

To see someone even attempt bittersweet treatment of this subject is surprising, but to largely pull it off is a major feat.

88 | Jami Bernard

A rare blend of comedy and tenderness whose point is not the horrors of war but the lengths a parent will go to protect his child's innocence.

88 | Roger Ebert

Finds the right notes to negotiate its delicate subject matter.

80 | Elvis Mitchell

Benigni effectively creates a situation in which comedy is courage. And he draws from this an unpretentious, enormously likable film that plays with history both seriously and mischievously. Piety has no place here, nor do tears until the final reel. Life is Beautiful plays by its own rules

80 | Joshua Klein

The concept is not so much nihilistic as it is realistic, and the fact that Benigni has made such fine distinctions so powerfully clear is amazing and moving.

80 | Sean Means

It's a high-wire act without a net, and Benigni pulls it off with astounding grace and sensitivity.

80 | Michael O'Sullivan

In one bold stride, Benigni has set himself apart from the rank and file of funnymen, joining the elite class of clowns who know that humor and heartbreak are only a howl of pain apart.

80 | M. V. Moorhead

If, like Benigni, you were born after World War II, it reassures us that he hasn't forgotten the innate seriousness of his subject matter, and that despite its grimness, he still thinks life is beautiful.

75 | Rick Groen

Ultimately, Benigni's comic refinery merely transforms the banality of evil into a lesser sin -- the evil of banality.

75 | Walter Addiego

Succeeds better than it ought to, largely because of the personality and prodigious talents of its director and star, the Italian comedian Roberto Benigni.

75 | James Berardinelli

It's the depiction of the love and sacrifice of a father for a son that makes Life is Beautiful worthwhile.

70 | David Rooney

Sluggish, uneven and lacking in rhythm, it nonetheless has enough pathos and winning humor.

70 | Rita Kempley

While it celebrates the triumph of humor, invention and the human spirit, Life Is Beautiful is not the transporting experience it might have been. Benigni knows how to make us laugh, but he has not yet figured out how to make us cry.

67 | Owen Gleiberman

Starts out as sentimental whimsy and ends as sentimental kitsch.

67 | Marjorie Baumgarten

Manages to incorporate all these things into a moving yet unsentimental story about the beauty of maintaining one's wits while stumbling blindly in the insane no man's land that lies beyond wit's end.

60 | Kenneth Turan

While it's futile to pretend that Life Is Beautiful completely triumphs--it's simply too tough a concept to sustain--what is surprising about this unlikely film is that it succeeds as well as it does.

60 | Michael Atkinson

Has one of the most stupendously tasteless premises in cinema history, and much of the time when this movie tries to beckon a smile, the effect is closer to astonished nausea.

50 | Mick LaSalle

Benigni sets out to do the impossible.

50 | David Sterritt

Has good intentions, but its exaggerated celebration of quick-witted improvisation ultimately trivializes the human and historical horrors evoked by the story.

50 | J. Hoberman

Life Is Beautiful is funny (kinda) and even tasteful (sorta). But in its fantasy of divine grace, it is also nonsense.

50 | Sandra Contreras

Benigni wants to tell a poignant fable rooted in the love between a father and son, but everything hinges on whether one finds his gags inspired or tasteless. Humor can only save some of us.

30 | Ella Taylor

The director gives us not just a pop Holocaust but a prettified, palatable Holocaust.

20 | Jonathan Rosenbaum

The indifference of the proceedings and the hero's slapstick behavior to the everyday realities of the camps borders on the nauseating.

20 | Richard Schickel

In this climate, turning even a small corner of this century's central horror into feel-good popular entertainment is abhorrent.

10 | Charles Taylor

The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.