It’s been years since a film has moved me to tears. But if there’s one film that can melt even the most stone-hearted of viewers, it is Bicycle Thieves. I can’t quite explain what it’s about because I don’t know, really. It follows a man named Antonio, thin as a scarecrow, as he tries to make a living. He needs a bicycle for the job he is lucky enough to get, but his bicycle gets stolen, and he roams the city trying to get it back, his little son dragging along behind him.

But Bicycle Thieves isn’t about that bicycle, really. It’s about fathers and sons, about the way the poor steal from each other because somebody else steals from…

I simply can not believe that these people are non-professional actors. There's the malnourished Ricci played by Lamberto Maggiorani who was just a factory worker at the time. And his son Bruno, played by Enzo Staiola who was merely 9 years old! It's inconceivable! The way they put up such a sublime performance without any training.

I would imagine they were not really acting at all and was just going on with their lives as usual, (and somehow De Sica received permission to film them like how they do reality shows now) but I can not ignore the obvious fact that Lamberto and Enzo are not blood related at all.

Still, their depiction of a father and son relationship on…

Featuring untrained actors in starring roles, shot in real locations with no studio sets & using only natural light to capture its drama, Bicycle Thieves (also known as Ladri di Biciclette) is one of the finest & most influential films to come out from Italian Cinema and is amongst the first films that brought neorealism into the world of motion picture filmmaking.

Set in poverty-stricken Rome in post-World War II Italy, the story of Bicycle Thieves concerns a poor father who's scavenging for any kind of work to support his family. Having secured a job after selling his precious possessions to buy a bicycle which is required to carry out the work, the future looks promising but his whole world is turned…

Second viewing; slight downgrade from four-and-a-half stars to a strong four. Still works splendidly as a small-scale, heartbreaking allegory of an impoverished post-war Rome, where Antonio's plight mirrors the vast majority of working-class men in a tattered Italy. Absolutely broken by the father-and-son restaurant sequence, where the brief glimpses of freedom, happiness and leisure felt like a direct inspiration for Moonee's joyous breakfast buffet in The Florida Project nearly 70 years later. Completely eschews happy endings and conventional melodrama in true neorealism fashion; the conclusion, in fact, beautifully reverberates backwards with painful irony. Where Bicycle Thieves falls short of Shoeshine and Umberto D's sheer mastery lies within its characters, where Antonio simply doesn't have the sheer emotional clout of Umberto…

Amid a century of unprecedented war and human suffering, Bicycle Thieves is often tagged as depressing for its devastating climax depicting its hero’s darkest moment of moral failure, yet I view this masterpiece as refreshingly frank and even inspiring for the humanism at its core. Long before — and, I think we can assume — forever after the hero Antonio’s nearly tragic lapse, this man embodies humanity at its essence: resilient, resourceful, caring, loving, moral, committed. Despite his family’s deprivation he faces the ultimate challenge of modern civilization: the day-to-day, hour-to-hour struggle to survive, to procreate, and to provide for your offspring. Perhaps more devastating than this character’s moral lapse is the reality of the society in which he must…