So this movie is apparently a classic of postwar Italian neo-realism. Which means in practice: Shit was bad in Italy in 1948, and film-makers started portraying that in a gritty way, featuring non-professional actors and filming on real streets. And so this is a movie about a lower-class dude who finally gets a much-needed job… that depends on him having a bicycle… which he had pawned for food. So they pawn their sheets(!) to get the bike back, he starts the job… and then the bike is stolen, which means he’ll lose the job.

The rest of the movie is basically his quest to get the bike back. What’s super-depressing is how much some of these scenes — in a desperate, depressed, crime-ridden country — are similar in substance to what happens in modern America when a bike is stolen.

Anyway, though, the film is mostly notable as a portrait of this man’s poverty and desperation in a time of general poverty and desperation, at which it succeeds well; and as a portrait of postwar Rome, at which… well, it also succeeds, but it’s a little weird, because all the extras in it are gesticulating wildly and shouting angrily all the time, and I swear to god if you took these exact actors doing these exact things and put them into a modern American film, you’d be like, “whoa, what the fuck with the outdated ethnic stereotyping, this is waaaay over the top,” but obviously an Italian film with Italian actors is probably not indulging in weird anti-Italian prejudice. So, uh, maybe Italians were just really angry and demonstrative in real life?

Also, interesting trivia: The first edition of this poll was in 1952, when this film was new-ish, and it was #1 on the list at that time. And obviously there’ve been a lot of movies that have come out in the last 60 years, so it’s not super-weird that it’s fallen down the list a lot; but there are also 10 movies released before 1952 that are now above it (including Citizen Kane), so critical consensus is at least medium-fickle.