Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella) Reviews and Ratings



  • January 18, 2009
    A film everyone should see!
  • January 15, 2009
    This movie is so wonderful! Sad... But what a perspective on life! Love it!!
  • January 15, 2009
    Excellent. Funny. Accurate.
  • January 15, 2009
    grande film...non ci sono parole
  • January 13, 2009
    always reminds me that life is beautiful
  • January 12, 2009
    Life is beautiful indeed... Roberto is a master of emotional movies...
  • January 11, 2009
    So brilliant, I cried...
  • January 11, 2009
    i luv dad

    i hate war
  • January 10, 2009
    Um filme que nos mostra que mesmo no meio da mais profunda dor, é possivel levar a felicidade aos que mais amamos. Uma comédia dramática de um actor fenomenal.
  • January 10, 2009
    I know it's not to everyone's taste, but it makes me cry like a small child every time I watch it. It's a lock.
  • January 8, 2009
    the way someone treat troublesome is quite inspiring. i found this movie is so great.
  • January 7, 2009
    so beautiful. i have not cried in a movie in a very long time.
  • January 6, 2009
    The spirit of life ...
  • January 5, 2009
    menyingkapi masalah hidup dengan fun, menghibur bgt.
  • January 4, 2009
    forse il capitolo più importante per il cinema italiano, a distanza di anni e anni e anni.....
  • January 4, 2009
    A heart warming yet heart breaking film. One of my favourites of all time.
  • January 3, 2009
    Beautiful movie, contrasts the good and bad about humans, love in the middle of the holocaust.
  • January 3, 2009
    Laughing in the face of adversity is the best way to triumph over it. This is a sentiment I share with Roberto Benigni, director of Life is Beautiful (La Vita è Bella) the only movie to ever make me laugh out loud and leave me with sad tears in my eyes.

    The film has two parts to...( read more) it. In the first part Benigni, who also co-wrote the script with Vincenzo Cerami, plays Guido, a waiter working for his uncle who owns a hotel in Italy. He keeps bumping (literally) into his principessa Dora (Nicoletta Braschi). By staging an elaborate (and humourous!) series of events which make it appear as if the Virgin Mary herself is cooperating with him, Guido rescues Dora from marrying the stodgy town clerk. Life appears to be going fairly well for Guido even though Mussolini has just signed a pact with Hitler to implement his Nazi policies with regards to Jews. Flash forward five years later and we see Guido owning a bookstore he manages with his wife and son Giosué. It's almost the end of World War II, but that makes the position of Jewish-Italians all the more precipitous. One day, the Germans come to take away Guido and his son. His wife, not being Jewish, chooses to go along.

    Right from the start, Guido takes a huge risk by treating the whole exercise as a joke. He explains to his son that they've just bought tickets to take part in a contest to win a tank (not a toy one, but a real one, thought of which lights up Giosué's eyes) and proceeds to concoct an imaginative and humourous explanation for the happenings around, and to, them in the German concentration camp.

    All of the things Guido asks Giosué to do are in the interest of saving Giosué. However, given Guido's personality depicted in the first half of the film, I don't think he could've acted differently even if wanted to. While the first part of the movie illustrates Benigni's talents as a slapstick comedian, some of the best humour is in the German camp. Here, Guido is not only funny to his son (and the audience) but he must also eke out humour in situations where people's lives are stake. We see Guido making a joke out of a German officer's instructions to the prisoners---a situation where a misunderstanding on the part of the prisoner could lead to their deaths.

    Some may find this comparison sacrilegious, but Benigni reminds me of Jim Carrey in many respects. From his "performance" at the Oscars (climbing on chairs and rivalling Whoopi Goldberg in his one-liners), I assume Benigni very much lives his life the way he portrays Guido in Life is Beautiful, always cheerful, goofy, and smiling at and in the face of misfortune. Benigni's acting is terrific and believable. (As I write this, it's well-known that Life is Beautiful won the Oscar not only for Best Foreign Film, but Nicola Piovani won an Oscar for the Best Original Dramatic Score and Benigni won the Best Actor award.) The chemistry between Benigni and Braschi, who happens to Benigni's real-life wife, is excellent. The cinematography, the direction, and the pacing are all superb, except for the odd scene where Guido gets lost in the prison camp (which isn't that big) and stumbles across a pile of decaying corpses that have been through the gas showers. It is a jarring scene that simply does not fit in with the rest of the film.

    The movie has been criticised as an exercise in holocaust revisionism. In my view, the fantasy Benigni creates (and it is a fantasy) is done primarily to enable us to laugh at one of the most terrible atrocities to occur in human history.

    It's debatable how much children (or anyone) should be shielded from real-life horrors (I'm of the belief that it's generally better to know sooner than later), but in this fable, Guido's gamble (with a high risk) pays off. The emotional ending which made me cry is all the more powerful because up till the end, we do not know what is really going to happen. And given that most of the films I see comes out of Hollywood, I was shaking my head in disbelief long after the movie ended. This is the kind of a movie I've waited for a long time to be made and in my view deserved the Oscars for all the categories it was nominated for but didn't win. In so much as comparisons can be made, Life is Beautiful is a better picture than Shakespeare in Love and Benigni does a better job of direction than Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan.
  • December 30, 2008
    Not INto subtitles, thanks!
  • December 30, 2008
    Beautiful. Ironically beautiful.
  • December 29, 2008
    Even though it was in italian, that i couldn't understand, and even though it had subtitles, which i usually hate...this movie was just fantastic!!!
  • December 27, 2008
    great movie that i ever seen..must watch
  • December 23, 2008
    I've watched this movie when I was still 11 years old. I really had no idea what was the story behind it but my cousin forced me to watch. It was her treat. This was my first movie which I really watched even if I only understood it thru subtitles. It was shocking for myself that...( read more) I could understand the story even while reading the subtitles. What was more shocking was that I dragged my friends to watch it again. It's really a great movie. It really has a deep meaning to it. I love it~!
  • December 18, 2008
    it's the most beautiful movie tha i saw..
  • December 18, 2008
    Love, love love this movie
  • December 17, 2008
    great and funny...
    made me laugh and cry in the same time
  • December 10, 2008
    This movie was absolutely amazing. The end was incredibly sad but a very moving movie. I highly recommend it.
  • December 8, 2008
    que bien hecha pero ke pinche triste...
    para chillar mucho sip
  • December 5, 2008
    amazing story well acted fun
  • December 5, 2008
    Pretty much one of the best movies ever, even though it is about a sad topic.
  • December 3, 2008
    This movie makes me cry.
  • December 1, 2008
    Sad sad sad movie.
    But by far the best.
    If you haven't seen it buy it, don't rent it, buy it.
  • November 30, 2008
    i love this movie even thought i only saw it once i just can't being my self to watch it again it too much for me. usally if amovie is so prased by the critce and everyone around I end up not like it because it dose not live up to the hype created by the world around me. this mov...( read more)ie lives up to all the prase and then some.
  • November 26, 2008
    And so it is, "Life is Beautiful"
  • November 25, 2008
    es una buena historia, encnatandora. con la actuacion excelente del protagonista
  • November 24, 2008
    Funny and uplifting, but Roberto Benigni left out the true essence of the Holocaust in this charming father-and-son story.
  • November 23, 2008
    one of the best movies of all time.
  • November 22, 2008
    Traiter d'un sujet tellement affreux avec un humour si adroit. film percutant, film romantique, film touchant, film comique, film triste, film drôlement réussi.........
  • November 22, 2008
    very impressive innocent character portrayal by benigni...very touching movie.
  • November 21, 2008
    Life/Death is all what you make of the time you have.
  • November 21, 2008
    A sweet and beautiful film! Its have been boring if they talked English. I love the Italian Languange!
  • November 14, 2008
    Amazing, makes you cry
  • November 11, 2008
    this was great ... loved everything about it! would like to see it again!
  • November 10, 2008
    A masterpiece, but Benigni is kind of annoying at times..
  • November 8, 2008
    I just got around to watching this gem Friday. I must say, I can't wrap my head around any reason to dislike it at all. I can admit that the beginning has the potential to be a bit tedious, but it leads to one of the most touching and unique films I've ever seen. You'll experi...( read more)ence the entire spectrum of emotions. An absolute must see.
  • November 5, 2008
    I can NOT express how hard it was to watch this movie. Just the truth in what was being done to those people. The holocust hurts me personally and just to seee this stuff should really make people think.
  • November 5, 2008
    A one good family, A great Dad figure you can found in this film, i can't say a lot just enjoy, warning tears may want to comes out
  • November 1, 2008
    "Buongiorno principessa!"

Summary


Life Is Beautiful (La Vita è bella) Summary