Similar to Cinema Paradiso, this movie tells you about another time and place you never knew existed. I liked how it ended and that it was about something simple, a bike, but about so much more, poverty, crime, morality, love, self esteem.

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..

Watching Vittorio de Sata's 1948 film 'Bicycle Thieves' one is struck just quite how poor post-war Italy was: not only might ownership of a bicycle be critical to your chances of earning a livelihood, you might even pawn your bed-sheets when in need of money, while in the most deprived districts, people lived in almost medieval conditions. The film is rightly celebrated for its naturalism, although the story is essentially a shaggy-dog tale, and the primitive state of film-making 70 years ago cannot be totally ignored: the camera is just so much less proactive than on modern movies. But the heartbreaking ending, which finally explains the plural in the film's title, is perfectly judged. To an audience for which such tales really were their everyday reality, it must have been powerful stuff.

'Bicycle Thieves' is a sometimes poignant film about the plight of the 'little man' who has no contacts, no influence, no money, no nothing'.I must admit that the extremely high esteem in which it is held leaves me slightly at a loss. Its themes of wealth and class are clear but they rarely evoked much emotion within me for Antonio - our protagonist and victim of the titular bicycle thieves - is rather dull. The one and only exception to this is when he gleefully indulges at a local restaurant with his son Bruno. Alas, the pleasure it brings them is fleeting.I felt a modicum of indignation here and a degree of pathos there, but ultimately, 'Bicycle Thieves' did not compel me. Certainly not compared to the gritty kitchen sink fare of the British New Wave some years later. Rather, I appreciated it as a cinematic artefact; an educational experience rather than an entertaining one.