Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Aedonerre I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

poetcomic1 Lots and lots of little touches, little moments and the comedy is handled as delicately. It takes a 'light touch' to make pastry and Monicelli, the beloved Italian director of comedies has that light touch. The beloved comedian Toto does a delicately nuanced turn as the master safe-cracker. Mastroianni sheds his glamour and is quite believable as a lowlife with a baby and wife in jail. The old man, Carlo Pisacane, reveals a great talent for comedy in this his best role.The 'loot' at the end of this 'Rififi' style caper is... a pot of leftover pasta and beans. And the crooks ENJOY the pasta. It is really very good, they are hungry from working hard to break through the wrong wall and that moment of gastronomic joy and fellowship, I understood something about life that a dozen serious movies never taught me.

Eumenides_0 After enjoying Mario Monicelli's La Grande Guerra, I decided to continue to discover more of his work, and I wasn't disappointed. I Soliti Ignoti, although in a completely different genre, is as funny and elegant as his WWI satire.I Soliti Ignoti is a send-up of caper movies. John Huston invented the caper in 1950 with The Asphalt Jungle, and Jules Dassin's Rififi reached its zenith in 1955. There was nothing new to do but to satirize the genre now.The movie involves a group of incompetent, small-time crooks and thieves coming together to break into a pawn store and steal the safe full of money and jewels. The movie follows this idiosyncratic group planning the heist and trying to overcome the adversities that come up unexpectedly; plus they have to deal with their own private lives.The characters are diverse and have their own little back story: there's Peppe, a failed boxer; Cosimo, a veteran thief who gives the criminals the idea for the heist, but ironically can't join them since he's in jail; there's Tiberio, raising his baby alone while his wife is in jail. And actor Totò plays a small but delightful role as an ex-criminal who gives lessons on how to crack safes.The movie is inventive, full of setbacks and unexpected change of plans, and the humor derives not so much from the dialogue but from the ridiculous situations and personal problems the crooks face. And the movie comes together perfectly at the end - it's unexpected but wholly convincing, even inevitable.Mario Monicelli and his screenwriters deserve a lot of praise for this little pearl of humor.

fiorerr I am avoiding any sophisticated film analysis and simply stating this film is very funny. I admit I am afictionado of Italian films so perhaps I am overly generous in my appraisal. The photography evokes a time when Italy was just beginning to rise from the chaos of WWII and it offers a wonderful emotional change from the neo-realism of many of the era's classic films. It's the best slapstick, tried and true but presented with style and timing before the shticks became clichés......when Cosimo attempts to rob a jewelry pawn shop and points his gun at the owner asking him if he knows what he has in his hand, the proprietor insouciantly takes the gun from his hand and says "A Beretta in poor condition" and offers him 1000 Lire for it. There are many, many more examples but for me to recount them would detract from your enjoyment. To see Marcello and Claudia when they were younger than my children and before they were stars is good fun. Apropos of James Bond, just saw the new Casino Royale, in BDOMS when Cosimo is outside the jewelry pawn shop, 52 minutes+ into the DVD, the background music is the repeated opening bars of "Diamonds Are Forever" almost twenty years before Barry wrote the song for the James Bond flick.

Robert J. Maxwell An ensemble movie with multiple minor stories built around the main theme of a big heist on Madonna Street. Half a dozen or so hapless crooks decide to apply "scientific methods" to their plan to sneak through coal chutes and over rooftops into a vacant apartment. They will then use a car jack to break through a wall into the office next door where a fortune is stashed away in a safe. That's about as far as medical discretion will allow me to go in revealing the plot.There have been many carefully planned caper movies, before and after this one, like "The Asphalt Jungle." Some have even been turned into comedies, like Woody Allan's "Small Time Crooks." But this was one of the first I'm aware of that turned the caper movie into a ridiculous farce.I think I'll give one example of the kind of gags you can expect, to illustrate the style. To get to the vacant apartment the thieves must tiptoe across a skylight in the middle of the night and climb through a window on the other side. They are slipping along the metal framework, cursing each other, when suddenly blinding lights go on in the room underneath them and they must throw themselves flat on the glass to avoid detection. A young couple enter the room below and begin a loud argument about whether she really loves him and whether he's been unfaithful to her. The accusations are shouted back and forth, while 10 feet above them the immobilized gang alternately doze and gesture impatiently at one another as their carefully plotted timetable is all shot to hell.Well, alright, one more. One of the gang, a master photographer, Marcello Maistroianni, is assigned to make a movie of the opening of the safe, shooting from across the rooftops through an open window, so the combination will be registered on film. The gang watch the resulting film and moan while pairs of underpants on a clothesline drift across the office window and there are inserts of the photographer's baby crying. At the moment the combination is to be revealed the film stutters and slips off its sprockets.I can't help it. Stop me before I describe more. Okay -- last one. Two men have an argument in which a knife is produced. They fling angry insults back and forth, and one of them departs, slamming the wooden door behind him. The remaining man sneers at the door and hurls the knife at it. The knife doesn't stick, it bounces off.It's really impossible to recommend this too highly. What a lot of fun.