Life Is Beautiful

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Summary: The most wonderful story about how to cope with life's tests
Review: This movie has just totally changed what I thought a movie could do. It tares your heart out and pounds on it with a sledge hammer then gently puts it back in your chest. Roberto Benigni is just deleightful. I loved this movie. This movie should be one of those movies that everyone must see. His wife Nicoletta Braschi also gives an excelent performance. I loved the love story in this movie. And the actors had wonderful chemistry. They don't get any better than this!

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Summary: 'Life is Beautiful' is easily the best movie I've ever seen!
Review: The basis of this movie is genius! Roberto Benigni is perfect for the part. I laughed, I cried, and I felt the character's pain. 'Life is Beautiful' is the best movie ever!

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Summary: A magnificent story of selfless love
Review: This is the most wonderful movie I've ever seen! It gives such powerful lessons about hope and love and the beauty of the human spirit. In no way does it minimize the horrors of that period in our history but shows how it is possible to rise above evil and despair. It is truly a salute to life and a lesson in thankfulness everyone should see.

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Summary: It's a still life
Review: benini in this film does to the audience exactly what his character does to his son - he shields the viewer from the horror of the holocaust. whether this is just deluded or pernicious (benini turning one of the greatest tragedies in human history into comic schtick) is not for me to say. But the film is dishonest as they come. Life wasn't beautiful in the Holocaust and for the people who survived it there wasn't a happy ending. go read Primo Levi instead.

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Summary: Never seen a more touching movie
Review: Life is beautiful has really touched my life. It is funny, sad, beautifu

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Summary: The most touching film of the year
Review: My best friend took me to see this film after telling me that it is the Pope's favourite film. I was a bit apprehensive at first because I was not anxious to spend my Friday night witnessing the horror of the holocaust. However, the intense passionate love that this man felt for his family proved to me that that this film was about the strength of the human spirit. Believe it or not, there are some humourous parts in this film and although there are some extremely heartwrenching and painful parts, this is a film that you will think about almost constantly for days after viewing it. It made me truly believe the theme of the film...and that is that Life IS Beautiful!

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Summary: ...PERFECT EXAMPLE OF FIRST-RATE FILM MAKING
Review: Benigni's earlier feature "The Monster", was a showcase for the Italian actor/director's mastery of "physical" comedy. Indeed, he has frequently mentioned Chaplin as his big influence- and it shows. "Life Is Beautiful" is masterfully divided into two distinct halves. The first, chock full of this physical almost slapstick comedy style. The later half much more serious and so very touching. Everyone should see this film, not only because of it's style, but because as Benigni once said on ABC's "Good Morning America," the Holocaust belongs to each and every one of us.

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Summary: Is it possible to give a negative 5 star review?
Review: I watched this on a hotel pay-per-view TV while stranded by Hurricane Floyd and after the first half-hour I was thinking, "Grand Jury Prizewinner at Cannes?" How naked the Emperor is, and how often the self-appointed "critics" are too afraid to join the little boy in saying, "The Emperor has no clothes!" This film is at best boring and silly; at worst the most callus and offensive treatment of the subject of the extermination camps. "Funnyman" Benigni with his "rubberface" and his "humorous antics" spends the first half of the film reveling in his image of himself as a free-spirited soul undaunted by convention, using every slapstick cliche the public was bored to tears by generations ago (I kept waiting for him to rescue his "Princess" fron the railroad tracks). Unspeakably silly gags by this man who is so enraptured with himself he assumes everyone else is too...And now, let's settle in and watch how delightful he is in convincing his young boy that life in the camps is a game! Hide the child in the barracks...I actually flinched, thinking of the women who stuffed infants into the sleeves of their coats before entering the "shower rooms" in an effort to save the babies. Benigni must know about all of this, so for him to have made a movie like this indicates either an idiot (maybe he's not "playing" a character? Maybe this idiot is actually him?) or the most cynical use of the camps as a subject. Have any of you toured a camp? Dauchau, anyone? This film turned my stomach (in addition to being boring and stupid--I kept reminding myself that the French think Jerry Lewis is an incredibly wise actor--this is offensive beyond anything I've ever watched on the subject). There's a film called "Playing for Time", with Vanessa Redgrave, that I watched in Geneva years ago (called "L'Orchestre")--You want to see a parent trying to keep a child alive in the camps? Watch this, and you'll end up saying, as the Redgrave character did when someone told her it was imperative for her to live to witness to the world, "J'ai trop vue." Moi, j'ai trop vue to keep from saying this entire film belonged on the cutting-room floor, or, better still, as an idea Benigni considered and discarded as a slap in the face to what the camp victims, and the camp survivors, endured. Six million thumbs down on this outrageous piece of trash.

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Summary: once you've seen the movie, you can't forget it
Review: it's kind of a masterpiece you can see once every 10 years. As Charlie Chaplin, Benigni, precisely in this movie, moves us through deep emotions. Taking place in the worst place and time of our century, the Shoah, Benigni tells us a tale in which laughs and tears are entangled. It's a wonderful story of love. Love from a man for a woman, love from a father for his boy, and overall love for freedom.

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Summary: This film is a cinematic masterpiece!
Review: Genius storyteller Roberto Benigni has created one of the most beautiful movies ever to grace the theater. This movie starts out very funny and then turns sad. You get so interested in the movie that you forget about the sub-titles. Benigni gives one of the greatest proformances of the century as the Italian Guido. Benigni's wife is also wonderful in this as the devoted wife to Guido. Everyone should go see this wonderful dramedy.