Life Is Beautiful(1998)

From New Yorker

Would that it were. The great, donkey-faced Italian clown Roberto Benigni attempts an ambitious fable of comedy's redemptive power. He plays an Italian Jew who keeps alive his little boy's innocence in a Nazi concentration camp by pretending that the routines of the camp are no more than an intricate game staged for his son's benefit. After all, Benigni appears to be saying, the Germans were indulging a fantasy, too—the fantasy of total control. But Benigni's ironic counter-reality undermines this movie, not the Nazis, who were beyond ridicule for the same reason that they were beyond rationality. Totalitarianism makes the fantastic literal—that is its demonic appeal. Benigni's jokes and games just aren't enough, and you leave the movie thinking that what's touching is not Benigni's ministrations to the little boy but his own need to believe in comedy as salvation. With Nicoletta Braschi as the hero's wife, and Giorgio Cantarini, who has the heartbreaking quality of the children in the old neorealist movies, as the boy. Set design by Danilo Donati. Cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli. In Italian.
— David Denby