Greatly commercially and critically successful on release, it won three Academy Awards including Best Foreign Language Film, Best Actor for Roberto Benigni and Best Original Soundtrack, was one of the National Board of Review’s top five best foreign films of 1998 and it went on to be one of the highest grossing non-English language movies of all time.

Critical reviews for the film were incredibly positive with major praise for its story, performances, direction and its union of drama and comedy with Nell Minow of Common Sense Media giving it a 5/5 stars, saying: “This magnificent film gives us a glimpse of the holocaust, but it is really about love, and the indomitability of humanity in the midst of inhumanity”.

Critiques of the film’s combination of comedy with its subject matter have been made over the years with BBC Critic Tom Dawson writing that it “is intended as a tribute to the powers of imagination, innocence, and love in the most harrowing of circumstances,” but “Benigni’s sentimental fantasy diminishes the suffering of Holocaust victims” and Ilona Klein who stated that “no amount of love… and power of imagination helped… [victims] survive the gas chambers.”

Roger Ebert reviewed the film and stated that it “is about the human spirit… about rescuing whatever is good and hopeful from the wreckage of dreams. About hope for the future. About the necessary human conviction, or delusion, that things will be better for our children than they are right now.”

Today, it stands on Rotten Tomatoes at 80% with its critical consensus stating that it is a film which “offers the possibility of hope in the face of unflinching horror.”