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

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 18, 2010

We don't get to know the characters, exactly, but we experience something more interesting: we are brought into disconcerting, almost documentary proximity with the lives they lead and the worlds they inhabit.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 15, 2009

Over the course of this sprawling mosaic about the world's most fearsome Mafia organization, the Neapolitan Camorra, [director] Garrone makes the business look like a beast of many tentacles, spreading misery and death to everyone it touches.

| Original Score: A- | May 1, 2009

Gomorra has its own nerve, as well as the filmmaking intelligence to strip the cliches from its densely packed, authentically inhabited narrative. The new moviegoing year just got one hell of a jolt.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 10, 2009

The sense of authenticity in this movie is palpable, but the scenes are sometimes so dark and so impenetrable that it takes a herculean effort to keep up with who's who and what's going on.

| Apr 9, 2009

Gomorrah manages to be artful without being arty.

| Mar 13, 2009

Garrone's gloomy assessment of the new world order is painfully on target: corruption comes in many guises, and it's as impossible to stop as it is to track.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 13, 2009

There's nothing extraneous about it, nothing excessive in its violence or its art. It's as desolate as it needs to be and no more.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 13, 2009

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

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 13, 2009

The film's multiple strands might reflect a trend in multiple story lines. And it works to persuasively argue just how pervasive the corruption is in this community.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 13, 2009

Stark, raw and brutal, this isn't Hollywood's romantic version of the Mafia.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Mar 6, 2009

It upends everything you think you know about the mob and mob movies.

| Mar 6, 2009

[Director] Garrone's messy storytelling compounds an already messy history. He's a powerful filmmaker, though, and a fearless one. He knows where the bodies are buried -- and he shows them to us.

| Original Score: B+ | Mar 2, 2009

What the director has created is a ferocious portrait of total corruption.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 27, 2009

Hell seems terribly familiar in Gomorrah, an Italian gangster film with a near-documentary feel.

| Feb 27, 2009

Such an ambitious and fascinating effort thematically that it's impossible to ignore.

| Feb 27, 2009

It's ugly. It's powerful. But it's hard to look away.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 26, 2009

If The Godfather is the operatic pinnacle of gangster movies, let Gomorrah be its biblical counterpart.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 26, 2009

Directed by Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah is both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Feb 26, 2009