Life Is Beautiful (1998)

I was surprised by the bad reviews, saying this movie was making fun of the Nazis and the horrors of the war. It's not true at all! The movie talks about a father who would do anything for his kid and tries to hide the horrible truth, making it look like a game to the child's eyes. Roberto Benigni's performance was brilliant, he perfectly shows that he himself is scared, but is trying to hide by being exuberant as the real life actor actually is. The plot is good, the ending is heart breaking. A mix of sadness and happiness. The only thing I didn't like was the actress who plays Guido's wife, who is Benigni's actual wife. Her acting is almost ridiculous. Also, there was a scene where Guido, the principal character, takes a megaphone used by the Nazis to communicate with her wife. That's so unrealistic. If not for that, I would have rated the movie 9, or even 10.

When a Jewish librarian and his son become victims of the Holocaust, he uses a perfect mixture of will, humor, and imagination to protect his son from the dangers around their camp. Life is Beautiful has Benigni doing his usual things both in front and behind the camera and unfortunately his humor is quite dated. (4/10)

A beautiful movie, absolute masterpiece. A must watch movie.

It shouldn't be surprising that this movie isn't a very great one, as it is very hard to take a matter like the holocaust and try to create a parody of it as Benigni tries to do here. Yet it has been done before succesfully, but unfortunately Life is Beautiful is not one of these instances.It seems to be a movie with the central message that you can find hope in anything or anyone, yet it comes off as a sitcom with jokes you just can't seem to laugh about. Benigni himself was overacting like a madman the entire film, yet comically, dramatically and emotionally he does not seem to make any dent whatsoever. The story is also rushed. He suddenly has a child and expects that this is his free ticket in order to feel sympathy for his character, yet it comes across as a cheap way to get the audiences undeserved sympathies. Benigni uses cliché'd jokes that we have all seen before, rendering it inaffective as a comedy film. The movie doesn't take itself seriously enough in its seemingly serious setting of the holocaust, making it also fail as a dramatic or emotional film. Ofcourse Dr Strangelove by Kubrick is an example of where it actually works to create a comic effect over a serious matter, but this is generally because the comic aspect is a lot funnier, the dramatic aspect is a lot more plausible, Peter Sellers is simply a better actor than Benigni, and the film knows at all times it does not take itself seriously, unlike this one.The cinematography is alright, but nothing special. There are a couple of nice landscape shots and the scene where the train arrives are quite nicely filmed, but it is nothing to cry home about. The music is decent, but not enough to make you emotionally involved in the picture like Ennio Morricone's score for fellow italian film Cinema Paradiso (1988) managed to do so well. There are also a lot of scenes in the latter part of the film where particular scenes could have easily been drawn out to create a more dramatic effect, yet Benigni cuts everything short and everything seems to end way too abruptly and quickly, negating any kind of emotional connection you might be starting to feel. I would say despite the fact that Benigni was even worse in the first half of the film, i would still prefer the first over the second, as atleast it seemed to know which direction it was going at that point, but in the second it turned into an unfocused mess of sillyness to the point where we cannot absorb any kind of dramatic or emotional impact we were supposed to get.If you ignore all these obvious issues, which i am certain a lot of people did, some might consider it a movie with a message, yet you are indifferent to any possible message since the characters seem indifferent to the situation.