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.
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.
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).
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
