Gomorrah | Telescope Film
Gomorrah

Gomorrah (Gomorra)

Critic Rating

(read reviews)

User Rating

An examination of the Camorra, one of Italy's most notorious criminal organizations, and the desolate lives of civilians existing under their oppressive regime. In a world where innocent people have no choice but to live by the Camorra's rules and frequently become entangled in gang activities and violence, "Gomorrah" follows several men and the way their lives intertwine with this system.

Stream Gomorrah

What are critics saying?

100

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.

100

Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan

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

100

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Jennie Punter

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

100

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.

100

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.

100

Boston Globe by Wesley Morris

Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.

100

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.

100

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

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

100

Time by Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss

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

100

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.

100

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.

91

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.

90

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."

80

Village Voice by J. Hoberman

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

80

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.

80

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.

80

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.

70

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

50

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.