Critics reviews

Staying down and dirty, Gomorrah generates bleak magnetism from the partnerships Garrone forges with his actors. Garrone doesn’t inflate his characters into arch-villains or tragic failures. Together, he and his ensemble create indelible images of bravado and anguish.

The “urban nightmare” of gangster films is intensified and Garrone employs strategies of defamiliarisation and distortion, breaking the aesthetic codes of realism in the process.

This is a vision of hell conveyed in a simple, documentary style, far removed from the sumptuous American Mafia fables... What [Garrone] has created is a ferocious portrait of total corruption.

[A] remarkable, slightly unconventional, and strictly unglamorous Mafia epic... Unlike most of the multi-thread narratives in today’s cine-Babel, "Gomorrah" manages to convince on the macro-level because its makers have taken care to actually attend to the micro-level and build their way up, instead of forcing the stranglehold of a predetermined pattern on the proceedings.

Riveting from its first frame to its last. As a deromanticizing of the myth of the suave, Michael Corleone-style gangster icon, the film is overwhelmingly effective. But considering that what you're seeing is, essentially, what's actually happening in and around Naples right now, "Gomorrah" begins to feel more like a weird, Jodorowsky-esque surrealist nightmare.

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.

"Gomorrah" looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims. That is its power. Here is a film about the day laborers of crime.

Don’t look for resolution, romanticism, or comic relief in this underworld tour, shot with a fast, you-are-there look and no pity; you won’t find picaresque goodfellas or Sopranos-style ziti eaters here. Instead, there’s the power of damning truth.

["Gomorrah"] demands a patient viewing, and maybe more than one; only after a second dose did I get the measure of Garrone’s mastery, and realize how far he has surpassed, not merely honored, [Roberto Saviano's] courageous toil... What is most impressive about Garrone is his refusal to let his style be bulldozed by the runaway violence of his subject.

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 as a series of seemingly disconnected scenes which, ultimately, you have to connect.

Probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history... The style of Garrone's film — long, episodic, solidly acted by a mix of familiar screen faces and nonprofessionals — is no more than efficient.

Though you feel his presence engraved in every image, Mr. Garrone’s handling of the same material is cooler [than Saviano's], emotionally detached, as if he were conducting an ethnographic study, a tactic that keeps the story from boiling over into melodrama.