Overblown and extremely overrated

Rating: 1/10 (26 March 1999)

I find it awfully strange that everyone is embracing a movie that strips the Holocaust of any of its meaning. This movie asks us to laugh at the events transpiring on screen, but not to feel or understand any of the horrors.
Benigni would have done his film a lot of good had he given us more of a feeling of how the people's lives were in terror. Then, the message of the transcendence of love and life would have been so much more powerful. Instead, he merely laughs everything off, giving us the feeling that even he's not taking his subject matter too seriously.
So, in the end we are left with a movie that trivializes the Holocaust - and people should be ashamed that they think so highly of it.