This classic neorealist masterpiece brings poetry to a poor family mans struggle to find work in post war Italy. Antonio Ricci is an unemployed man supporting a wife and two children. He is delighted to at last get a good job hanging up posters, but on the sole condition that he has a bicycle which must be used for work. But his happiness is short-lived when his bicycle is stolen by a bold young thief. Antonio thinks that the police will take the theft very seriously, but they are not really interested in the petty theft of a bike. The only option is for Antonio and his friends to walk the streets of Rome themselves, looking for the bicycle.

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, Vittorio De Sica’s Academy Award-winning Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette) defined an era in cinema. Simple in construction and dazzlingly rich in human insight, the film embodied all the greatest strengths of the neorealist film movement in Italy emotional clarity, social righteousness, and brutal honesty. Bicycle Thieves had such an impact on its first release that when the film magazine Sight Sound held its first international poll of film makers and critics in 1952, it was voted the greatest film of all time.

“The Bicycle Thief is so well-entrenched as an official masterpiece that it is a little startling to visit it again after many years and realize that it is still alive and has strength and freshness.” Roger Ebert, Chicago Sunday Times.

“Bicycle Thieves is a brilliant, tactlessly real work of art.” Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian.

“Surely the most universally praised movie produced anywhere on planet Earth.” J. Hoberman, Village Voice