Miracle in Milan (De Sica; Joseph Burstyn) is the freshest movie in years, a brilliant departure by Producer-Director Vittorio De Sica from the tragic realism of Italy's best postwar films, including his own Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief. Still deeply concerned with man's inhumanity to man, De Sica this time accents the positive ideal of human brotherhood in a warm,exhilarating, richly comic picture.
The film's style fits no convenient pigeonhole. De Sica calls Miracle in Milan a fable for grownups, a tale suspended midway between fantasy and reality. And in its wealth of visual ideas, its deft use of music, its passages...