Here is a film whose presentation is about stripping away the sentimentalism and romanticism associated with gangsters, as well as the subgenre of movies that depict them.

| Original Score: 2.5 | Dec 15, 2023

There are interesting sociological features here, but like most gangster films, Gomorrah gets much more caught up in the scenes of violence than is healthy.

| Feb 13, 2021

The violence in Gomorrah is shocking, but there's none of the exhilaration you find in films like Scarface or Goodfellas or City of God. Instead, what you get is a terrible, gut-clenching sense of clammy dread.

| Nov 13, 2020

An intensive and exhausting study of organised crime, Gomorrah holds back on the glamour and goes full-bore with the graft.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 19, 2020

The violence here is all the more unnerving arriving as it does, as pro boxers say, like the punch you didn't see coming. Its style falls between the verite school of documentary and a revitalized Italian Neorealism.

| Jun 18, 2020

This is a bleak look at a putrid culture and the way its black tentacles extend throughout Italy.

| Oct 3, 2019

Craft-wise it's solid, but beyond in-house intrigue there's not an awful lot going on beneath the surface.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 7, 2019

The documentary aesthetic, multi-layered storytelling and nihilism ensures that the action is satisfyingly disorientating.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 4, 2018

There is nothing grand or operatic about Gomorrah and, as a result, it is poundingly powerful. It is heartless yet gripping, off-hand yet peculiarly intimate, and courageous in the way it presents itself.

| Aug 23, 2018

Highly conscious of how it portrays the mafia, Garone's film serves as a useful antidote for those of us who watch and love movies that transform murderers into mythic figures.

| May 17, 2018

A cruel, ruthless portrait and per the serious threats received by the author of the homonymous book ... true. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 20, 2018

It's been a while since I first saw this brutal slice of social realism in Cannes. And it left an indelible impression, if not an urgent desire to see it again.

| Jan 2, 2018

... Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah grabs you with a strong sense of visual expressiveness and never ceases to let go...

| Oct 10, 2017

The Camorra grinds up the lives it touches, including those who take the gangsters as their role models for success.

| Jul 29, 2016

"Gomorrah" soberly shows the low-life thugs for what they really are, resisting the convention of casting them as anti-heroes in Scorsese or Tarantino land.

| Oct 7, 2015

The camera's performance, like that of the actors, keeps growing in scale and expressivity, even as life gets worse and worse.

| Nov 24, 2014

This might be one of those movies that are more fun to praise than they actually are to watch.

| Original Score: B- | Jun 22, 2013

Matteo Garrone doesn't so much reinvent the gangster genre as much as he reimagines it, taking all the usual trimmings and turning them inside out.

| Original Score: A- | May 26, 2013

A thrillingly bleak crime pic.

| Aug 16, 2011

It is a full and frank indictment of a system that has not just failed but utterly decayed and is breeding more and more criminals.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Apr 8, 2011