It's a FAIRY TALE. Really.

Rating: Null/10 (16 December 1999)

Most of the negative reviews of this film are missing the point entirely. This is not a faithful historical recreation; it was not billed as such. It is a fairy tale. Period.
Benigni's humor may not appeal to everyone, and of course the film manipulates sentiment in a grand manner, but it is no shameless misappropriation of the historical record. It does not cheapen the horrors of the Holocaust, nor pretend to be documentary.
This is a touching and sweet story of love and war, funny and poignant, and holding it to higher standards is silly, not to mention irrelevant. I wonder whether setting this during, say, the Hundred Years' War would have kept everyone's feathers smoothed.
The film can be critiqued for many things, but the subject is not one of them. I remember the admonitions of several high-school English teachers: "Don't give a book a bad review just because it's not a different book."
I suspect that many viewers were unable to set aside their gag-reflex prejudices, and were not reviewing the film itself at all; they were reviewing the FACT of the film.