Life is Beautiful, always makes me tear up when I watch it.
I appreciated the film as a representation of a dreadful time in history, but Begnini's over-the-top tone did not do it for me. Two other films depicting that period were very meaningful to me: The Pianist with Adrien Brody -- I think he may have won an Oscar for that -- and Julia, based on a WWII novel by Lillian Hellman.
And there is also the lovely 1970 Vittorio de Sica film about the ominous rise of fascism as affecting the Italian upper classes, many of whom were Jewish: The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.