On Screen

...Even after it does the director keeps his cinematic geography intact, showing us precisely where everyone is and who has fallen...

...Guido, who is Jewish, is apprehended by the Nazis, and with their young son Joshua (Giorgio Cantarini), is carted to a death camp...

...Despite the incarceration of his body...

...Traveling among soldiers of every rank, many of themplayed by well-known actors, Malick presents a remarkable variety of responses to combat...

...He refuses to indulge in trite story lines and characters...

...Life is Beautiful does not conclude with a fantasy whereby evil is miraculously conquered...

...Sergeant McCron (John Savage), whose entire squad has been killed, wanders through an area under shellfire, mad with guilt...

...Life is Beautiful, a new Italian film as independent from its predecessors as The Thin Red Line, is a comedy that treats the Holocaust with genuine seriousness and pathos...

...Guido has no fear of reprisal if a scheme will bring hrm closer to his darling...

...The clarity of its battle scenes makes The Thin Red Line the most impressive and heartrending war movie of the last two decades...

...Unlike The Great Dictator, Chaplin's own anti-Nazi diatribe...

...Roberto Benigni's much more modest Life is Beautiful is about a different aspect of World War II...

...Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), sick of the Army bureaucracy, refuses a commendation for bravery in action, while disobedient Captain Staros (Elias Koteas) is showered with medals by a disgusted Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte) who wants to quietly get him out of his regiment...

...Guido is quick to befriend the area's eccentrics and learn their habits...

...Refusing to bow to despair, he lifts his own and his son's spirits by pretending that camp life is an elaborate game, and that the contestant who can behave most stoically will win the grand prize of a genuine army tank...

...His strength of character makes Life is Beautiful a marvelously funny and intensely moving film of love and self-sacrifice...

...Malick is one of those rare directors who is capable not only of composing arresting images, but also of threading them together so that they—rather than the dialogue, which is commentary—propel his story...

...After being informed that he is to give a speech on racial superiority, he pridefully parades his hangdog face and lanky body before the students as an example of genetic perfection...

...I don't think we can hear too often that war is horrible, that, in the words of one of the characters, it "turns men into dogs...

...At the same time, the engines of destruction function with such terrifying swiftness that even the shirkers seem like heroes merely for having made it as far as they did...

...While everyone agrees that it is visually stunning, some critics have complained about its lack of a central character and its going on for an hour after the bloody engagement that would ordinarily form its conclusion...

...But Malick is doing something other than creating a high-tech remake of Sands of Iwo Jima...

...His joyful talents become crucial in the second half of the film, set a few years after the couple's marriage...

...But in moving from the Middle America of his earlier work to Guadalcanal in 1942, he brings his artistry to a new, expansive level...

...In one of the movie's funniest scenes, he impersonates an official who has been invited to the school where Dora teaches...

...The streaming sunlight, the placid waters, the gorgeous birds, the lush vegetation—all underline the freedom of the indigenous people and wildlife...

...He also falls in love with Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), the local beauty...

...They are pressed into hard labor, but also seem able to enter and exit their barracks at will...

...Midway through the film, when racist agitators paint anti-Semitic slogans on his uncle's horse, the uncle warns him to beware of changing times...

...No deliberate artificiality protects viewers from the trauma depicted by reminding them that they are only watching a movie...

...Tall, and the General who orders the attack (John Travolta), are the only ones who fully understand the strategic significance of their objective, and their eagerness to take the island seems to eclipse their concern for the men's survival...

...He uses his knowledge of their peccadilloes to convince Dora that on a walk through the town he can conjure up anything he asks for...

...Benigni, who directed, co-wrote and stars in the film, is the Charlie Chaplin of contemporary Italy...

...in his hands, life is transformed into a miraculous lark...

...The combatants are confronted by the disjunctionbetweenthe hideous machinery of death and the beauty of the place they have been assigned to capture...

...After 20 years of silence, Terrence Malick, the extraordinary writer-director of Badlands and Days of Heaven, has resurfaced with a new film as vibrant, thoughtful and passionate as his first two masterpieces...

...His stunning use of mise-en-scène conveys how important good leadership is, the relationship between the natural world and human nature, and the grisly horror of war...

...Guido is not permitted to overcome the superior strength of his oppressors...

...Guido shrugs, asking what such people can really do to him...

...In The Thin Red Line, the director's fans will recognize trademark touches: the meditative pace, vivid cinematography (by John Toll), use of voice-over narration, and intense attention to the beauties of the natural world...

...The prisoners look a little wan, but are still far too healthy for camp victims...

...The narration has been criticized both for being hackneyed and for employing overly poetic language considering the subject matter...

...We laugh at this apparent naïveté, but ultimately the movie bears out the wisdom of his query...

...Malick finds clear motivations for the brave and the cowering, insisting that we respect the behavior of both...

...Instead of simulating subjective horrors through jittery camerawork, abrupt editing and rapid shots of bullet-riddled troops, Malick tracks the progress of advancing soldiers through a smooth progression of shots the audience can follow...

...When, later in the film, the Americans begin to round up Japanese POWs, the hysterics of the defeated as well as the hostility with which their conquerors treat them become as tragic as the death and madness that our own side has experienced...

...Also extremely well made, it focuses on a single protagonist and has only one story to tell, making its achievement in some ways even more astonishing...

...Private Bell (Ben Chaplin) gets up his courage by recalling the soft embraces of his beautiful wife...

...Private Witt (James Caviezel), sure of the integrity of his spirit, yearns for a death he can accept with serenity...

...All serve, too, as a reminder that war exists only in those places we choose to wage it...

...The delightful first half, set in 1939, follows Guido as he courts his beloved, who is accustomed to moving in higher social circles...

...The accomplishment of The Thin Red Line is that it makes you feel this brutal effect without irony...

...Terrence Malick's new movie is a major work of enduring value...

...And it is unlikely that Guido and his mates could successfully hide Joshua after all the other children in tire camp had been gassed and burned...

...When Guido Orefice moves to the town of Arezzo in the hopes of someday starting a bookstore, he finds himself instantly at odds with most of its authority figures...

...Guido never concedes to the forces of hatred that surround him...

...But where the film fails in verisimilitude it succeeds as fable...

...As for the final hour, it only seems like an afterthought until a climactic moment brings the film full circle...

...The most significant antiwar movies of the last dozen years— Platoon, Full MetalJacket, Saving Private Ryan—tormented the eye with grotesque images of battle-mangled faces and bodies even as they rehashed, sometimes sarcastically, old movie clichés...

...The film has drawn contradictory responses...

...Sergeant Keck (Woody Harrelson), dying accidentally at his own hands, begs his comrades to tell his wife he fell bravely...

...Life is Beautiful is useless as a documentation of death camp atrocities...

...Though based on James Jones' autobiographical novel, this visceral film belies its literary origins...

...A brilliant performer with a long, elastic face and sparkling eyes, he takes aim at typical Chaplinesque targets like bloated bureaucrats and militant officials, but in a far more somber social context...

...The Thin Red Line never questions the necessity of fighting World War II, but it demands that the audience recognize everyone on the ground as a victim...

...The collective impact of The Thin Red Line's many contradictory voices and images, however, has aprofound coherence...

...He has created a three-hour war epic that explores the thoughts of American soldiers preparing for combat with the Japanese, fighting, then recovering afterward...

...Recent American films like Shine, American History X and Apt Pupil trivialized the Holocaust, using the Nazi horrors as background material that lent an air of weightiness to their sensationalistic plots...

...He can only maintain his great good nature...

...The terror comes from the frequent sequences where we look with the movie's infantrymen at an apparently serene landscape, aware that at any moment the greenery might explode in a nightmare of smoke and fire...

...It never lets us forget the idiocy of racist pride, the insanity of the Nazi regime, or that the death camps coldly destroyed millions of innocents...

...Guido woos Dora through playful deceit...