The Hollywood Reporter

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.

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

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

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jennie Punter

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

Washington Post by Jan Stuart

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

San Francisco Chronicle by Walter Addiego

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

Boston Globe by Wesley Morris

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

Chicago Tribune by Michael Phillips

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.

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

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

Time by Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss

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

Entertainment Weekly by Lisa Schwarzbaum

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.

The Hollywood Reporter by Natasha Senjanovic

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.

The A.V. Club by Scott Tobias

Gomorrah takes place in a world where decency can't take root and we can only watch in horror as crime overwhelms society's most vulnerable-- women, children, law-abiding citizens, and the conscientious few who want to get out of the game.

Salon by Andrew O'Hehir

This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.

Variety

Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.

L.A. Weekly by Ella Taylor

The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.

Empire by Damon Wise

A sombre, slow, but well-paced study of organised crime in urban Naples that leaves a very grim taste in the mouth.

Chicago Reader by J.R. Jones

Given the breadth of the story, the characters never achieve much depth, but they're part of a larger pattern: the younger ones are eager to find their way into the organization while the older ones are desperate to find their way out

New York Magazine (Vulture) by David Edelstein

Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.