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Life is Beautiful
Life is Beautiful follows a Jewish Italian book shop owner, who must use a perfect mixture of will, humor and imagination to shield his son from the horrors of internment in a Nazi concentration camp.
30 November 1951, Modica, Ragusa, Italy
13 March 1937, Como, Lombardy, Italy
3 April 1946, Madrid, Madrid, Spain
1960, Heidelberg, Germany
5 May 1923, Brindisi, Puglia, Italy
8 May 1955, Pistoia, Tuscany, Italy
28 December 1964, Rome, Lazio, Italy
March 22, 2006
Benigni does with the Nazi setting what Chaplin didn't dare in The Great Dictator--he lets the liberating nonsense triumph.
January 01, 2000
You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll smile through the evils of genocide!
January 01, 2000
Art-house sentimentalists will likely go for Beautiful in a big way, but even those who aggressively resist manipulation can find a lot to admire.
January 26, 2007
Sentimental and contrived, Benigni's well-intentioned Holocaust dramedy may only work as a children's fable. Inexplicably, it won a prize at the 1998 Cannes Festival.
August 20, 2009
The film's title, which very well could have been a straightforward declaration prior to the war, becomes a source of twisted irony once we witness Guido pull down the grate outside his humble bookshop and the words JEWISH STORE are seen sprayed across th
December 25, 2010
Wrenching Holocaust fable with bittersweet humor.
February 14, 2001
Its sentiment is inescapable, but genuine poignancy and pathos are also present, and an overarching sincerity is visible too.
March 11, 2008
With Life Is Beautiful, the final frontier of schmaltz has been reached.
January 01, 2000
In the real death camps there would be no role for Guido. But Life Is Beautiful is not about Nazis and Fascists, but about the human spirit.
January 01, 2000
dares to laugh in the face of the unthinkable. And because Benigni can be heart-rending without a trace of the maudlin, it works.
April 12, 2002
Yes, there are heaps of charm and poignancy in this trifle, but it's a trifle nonetheless -- light-and-bright, for sure, but also slight-and-trite.
March 08, 2013
Roberto Benigni's finest hour arrived in 1997 when the triple-threat writer/director/actor delved deep into Charlie Chaplin territory - see "The Great Dictator" (1940).