Life Is Beautiful caused more than a little controversy when it was released.

Rating: 8/10 (30 June 2010)

A Jewish father (Roberto Benigni) in the concentration camps pretends the events he witnesses are all part of a game, in order to better preserve the innocence of his young son (Giorgio Cantarini). The film was financially successful, earning 23 million euro in Italy. In the United States, the film earned $59 million.
Life Is Beautiful is the most reviled film ever to have been made with the best of intentions: for those whose analytical brains overruled their sobbing mechanisms, this Holocaust fantasia committed several gross lapses in taste, historical accuracy and basic human decency. Its take on the camps is an original one, to say the least, though it doesn't finally confront the horrors therein so much as run away and hide from them.