Critic Reviews

The fingerprints of the Camorra are everywhere, this film wants us to know, and its grip is lethal.

Powerful, stripped to its very essence and featuring a spectacular cast (of mostly non-professionals), Matteo Garrone's sixth feature film Gomorra goes beyond Tarrantino's gratuitous violence and even Scorsese's Hollywood sensibility in depicting the everyday reality of organized crime's foot soldiers.

Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying.

Probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history.

Gomorrah looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims. That is its power.

The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

This is a vision of hell conveyed in a simple, documentary style, far removed from the sumptuous American Mafia fables.

This vibrantly disorienting cinematic import reinvents the vocabulary of the crime drama with a painterly eye and a feverish documentary style.

An unforgettable portrayal of the unglamorous gangster life, which is often short and never sweet.