Amoeba Music

Hailed around the world as one of the greatest movies ever made, the Academy Award–winning Bicycle Thieves, directed by Vittorio De Sica, defined an era in cinema. In poverty-stricken postwar Rome, a man is on his first day of a new job that offers hope of salvation for his desperate family when his bicycle, which he needs for his work, is stolen. With his young son in tow, he sets off to track down the thief. Simple in construction and profoundly rich in human insight, Bicycle Thieves embodies the greatest strengths of the Italian neorealist movement: emotional clarity, social rectitude, and brutal honesty.

Special Features:

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray Working with De Sica, a collection of interviews with screenwriter Suso Cecchi d'Amico, actor Enzo Staiola, and film scholar Callisto Cosulich
• Life as It Is, a program on the history of Italian neorealism, featuring scholar Mark Shiel Documentary from 2003 on screenwriter and longtime Vittorio De Sica collaborator Cesare Zavattini, directed by Carlo Lizzani
• Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
• A book featuring essays by critic Godfrey Cheshire and filmmaker Charles Burnett, classic writing by Zavattini and critic André Bazin, and reminiscences by De Sica and his collaborators