SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Ploydsge just watch it!

Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Edwin The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

adonis98-743-186503 In post-war Italy, a working-class man's bicycle is stolen. He and his son set out to find it. The Bicycle Thief is just another dull, boring and quite uninteresting film that just doesn't really reach any actual good dramatic levels or a story that would at least surpass it's flaws and give us something interesting and instead here we are again with a film simple enough and yet on screen it appears on a different kind of a scale and unfortunately it does not hold up at all both as a movie but also as a picture or a movie experience in general or whatever you wanna call it..

TheNabOwnzz On the surface Vittorio de Sica's Bicycle Thieves doesn't appear to have a story worth filming about, since it is about a poor man whose bicycle gets stolen while on the job, but de Sica has somehow given this neorealistic motion picture such depth and such emotion that it has turned into such a great and personal film which is loved by many.It has to be noted that this is a neorealism picture, meaning that none of the actors in the film were really actors, but random people who are usually associated with their respective role. I did not find out about this until after i watched it, and i was not beginning to doubt it since the actors in this film are just as good as professional ones. Lamberto Maggiorani, who was a steel worker, captures the inner struggles and desperation of his character perfectly with his exceptional facial acting and his true energetic relentlessness in searching for his stolen bicycle.One has to ofcourse understand the struggles of post WWII italy in order to relate to the financial situation of this film, since there were a lot of poor struggling families like the one we follow in the film, and their tale of forlorn attempts to improve. We also have some great black and white cinematography which visually also creates a narrative of its own of how poverty seems to reign in Rome, with many shots of poor homes. The screenplay is as simple as the movie but still consists of so many morally questionable and realistic dialogue such as 'There's a cure for everything, except death'. Also worth a mention is the incredible score by Alessandro Cicognini, whose violins accurately enhance the sad story that is being played out on screen.Especially the final thirty minutes are absolute world class, and the final climax ( Without spoiling anything ) shows its inevitable ending so greatly. The events that unfold in the film might be simple, but it's the kind of film that will make a great emotional impact on you even when the simplest things happen due to the truly realistic depressing feeling and the great connection with the characters.

robobalboa To be completely honest I came to this film as just another movie to cross off the list that everyone talked about. It was almost a joke. If you wanted to get into foreign films it was this and The 400 Blows, and maybe Seven Samurai. And I watched this film with the expectations that it was a CLASSIC, or Untouchable or a film without a peer, after all in Robert Altman's "The Player", the thought of remaking this film is a joke, and as a character says "You'd probably give it a happy ending." So I came into it expecting a depressing, black-and-white-foreign-language film that was completely removed from me and unrelatable in the sense that I would never know what it felt like to be a father in post-war Italy. I was wrong. In plain and simple terms I couldn't have been more wrong. This film, apart from being engaging and full of pathos and tragedy, represented so many disturbing and uplifting facets of the world that for every fear there was angel, for every danger was a comfort. This should always and forever be remembered as the Greatest Street Casting of all time and it should also be remembered as the Greatest Father-Son-Film of all time. Whether you have a wonderful relationship or a strained relationship with your father this film could go a long way to explaining a lot of the simplicities and complexities of relationships that have haunted humans for generations. This is a pure film. It's honest. It's real and it's magnificent. It will stand the test of time, and it unfortunately has never been topped. I can't give you historical reasons or even reasons based on the creators' filmography why this film is so magnificent, I can't even give you a non-emotional reason why this film is just so damn good, all I can say, or recommend is that this film goes deeper than you expect it to, further than you want it to, and represents a slice of life than hopefully none of us will ever know, and in that creates a beautiful piece of art that has lasted 70 years and could easily last 70 more.

Prismark10 Set in Italy after the second world war, Bicycle thieves is an example of Neo-Realism Italian cinema, looking at broken Italy and its broken people trying to survive in poverty.From the opening shot we can see Antonio Ricci as lost all hope. He is in the margins of society and suddenly there is a job opening for putting up posters that requires having a bicycle. However he has no bike, he pawned it. His wife Maria pawns their bed sheets and uses the money to get the bicycle back.For the first time in a long time Antonio believes life is on the up. With the wages and the family allowance he reckons he can look after his family. He finally has hope.This hopes come crashing down when his bicycle is stolen by an opportunistic thief and he searches all over Rome with his son Bruno looking for the bike and thief.Antonio gets increasingly desperate in the search for his bike, by the end he is humiliated and fatalistic. See Antonio almost get knocked over by a truck he does not care.There is a key scene at a restaurant with his son where Bruno eats a pizza and drinks water and Bruno sees a wealthy family eating a sumptuous lunch. Antonio explains to him how important this job was and the money he was going to make meaning he could afford treats like this for the family.Antonio may not had been good in his job but the film explored the men who were marginalized in Italian working class society and it was their wives who had to be practical in order for the families to survive.This is a raw film it is not an easy watch, you suffer as Antonio goes on his fruitless search and you will him to steal a nearby bike and just ride off.