One of the all-Time greatest!!

Well, there's probably not much we can tell you. Sometimes certain styles of filmmaking just don't work for certain people, and that's fine.

However, I can barely imagine watching this film and not having some sort of emotional reaction - if not just intense anger at the treatment of young boys by the justice system and the prison guards (who, yes, are "just doing their jobs.") Boys who, in at least many cases, could be rehabilitated - if their conditions were better and if they were treated as young people who had done something wrong rather than hardened criminals (which isn't to suggest that some of them aren't already hardened criminals.)

Personally, the thing that makes these Neorealist movies so affecting for me is their sense of immediacy. They were filmed on real streets in real cities, and the actors are generally non-professionals who bring a sense of reality to the proceedings (in other words, they don't have to try as hard to act since a lot of the settings and scenarios are very familiar for them.)

Also remember that those same actors had just lived through one of the most horrific wars in the history of the world, and you can still see the scars in the cities they live in and in the actors themselves. Though I don't want to make it sound like these films are simply historical curiosities - I believe they're much more universal than that and can teach us much about the present day - in a way, they feel like a time machine of sorts that can show us life in a different era.

Many of them are very specifically about the socioeconomic conditions in Italy during and immediately after the war. I don't think you have to understand the historical context to appreciate them, but it does help.

Besides that, I'm also a big fan of films that bring attention to social injustices - and to the "forgotten" men, women, and children of the world. This film in particular is about how the institutions set up to "rehabilitate" are often actually criminogenic - a topic that's still extremely relevant to this day. The film does set up a somewhat implausible "frame-up" so that we have no doubt about the boys' ultimate innocence, but the consequences of their time in prison are very realistic: by being forced to associate with other boys who committed far greater crimes and who are considerably more "hardened," they are undoubtedly made worse by their time in the center. In other words, the juvenile detention center exacerbates any problems they boys may have, rather than doing anything to help rehabilitate them. Bad things happen when you mix together boys who did something as relatively harmless as selling stolen goods and boys who killed their own parents.

It's also about the uncompassionate nature of the "justice" system, and a condemnation of the attitudes of those who prefer to try to bury problems away rather than actually dealing with them - even if, in doing so, they end up making the problem much worse. It's about those who say "well, these criminals are bad because they're criminals, so who cares what happens to them" (a line you still often here to this very day.)

I suppose on a clear day you can see the class struggle from here