Bicycle Thieves

The work of screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, director Vittorio De Sica, the nonprofessional actors, and many others is so charged with a common purpose that there's no point in even trying to separate their achievements.

Undeniably the most important neorealist film after Rossellini's Open City.

De Sica carefully balances a generally tragic sensibility with a quiet undercurrent of hope, all the while sucking us into the story with the sheer urgency of the search for a stolen bicycle.

The picture is a pure exercise in directorial virtuosity.

This film manages to appeal to the better angels of our nature in a way that only deepens as we grow older along with the film.

It's a title you simply must watch, not necessarily for the truths it packs but rather for the bombed-out buildings of postwar Italy, peripheral details that director Vittorio De Sica insisted on.

It's not hyperbole to flatly state that this is one of the all-time greats in the annals of cinema; on my own list, only Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal ranks higher when it comes to foreign-language films.

It has passages of beauty and heartbreak that suggest a genuine humanism that is all too often lacking from movies whose primary goals are to thrill, excite, or otherwise distract from life itself.

Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves is tender and immediate, a simple tale of a man whose bike is stolenwhen his job and life depends upon it.

The Bicycle Thief does have a certain ramshackle simplicity, quietness, and even naivete that are not unwelcome as a change from the stunning noise, ingenuity, and sophistication of Hollywood.

...captures, in elemental strokes, the crushing of the human spirit at the hands of poverty, indifference and despair.

[VIDEO ESSAY] Vittorio De Sica advanced Italian neorealist cinema in 1948 with a modest story about a family man trying to get back the bicycle that was stolen from him.