Critics reviews

These primal modalities — repression and release, singular and whole — are pitted against age-old Italian institutions, bringing to the film’s neorealist forbears an unflinching portrait of familial dysfunction that represents the crumbling of society as a whole... Fists in the Pocket teems with ugly urges and illicit desires, yet it’s the final moment of restraint that unforgettably succeeds in wrenching the knife even deeper.

[Bellocchio's] first film [is] a work that he arguably has been unable to match since. It is a stunning debut and a must-see for anyone interested in the stark shift Italian cinema experienced in moving from the post-realism phase of the 1950s into the experimentalism, social commentary, and surrealism of the 1960s.

As fascinating and compelling now as it was fifty years ago, Fists in the Pocket is a murderous portrait of familial dysfunction, like a Grey Gardens with a death wish.

Bellocchio's amazing first film... [The director] orders his material and directs his actors with such verve and passion that audiences have little time and less inclination to giggle. In particular, Lou Castel's performance as Alessandro... seethes with a hateful energy rarely seen on the screen.

Marco Bellocchio’s startling debut—a visceral case study of a wildly dysfunctional bourgeois family—not only introduced the director’s full-throttle approach to character psychology but a supremely operatic performance by Lou Castel.

[Fists in the Pocket] shows real empathy towards its characters... that’s practically in inverse proportion to their capacity for socialization; its motto might almost come from Terence—“Nothing that is human is alien to me”—except I suspect that Bellocchio finds arid respectability nearly grounds for inhumanity.

Fists in the Pocket is one of the reasons people still remember Italian cinema as a great and powerful force... It dropped like a bomb on the quiet world of midsixties Italian cinema, still under the spell of a humanistic, postwar neorealism. Radical and grotesque, fast-paced and sarcastic, it left all who saw it breathless.

The visual propulsiveness of Marco Bellocchio’s feature film debut, Fists in the Pocket, is its style... It’s as if tracks have been placed on the characters’ exposed nerves and every path approaches abstraction.