Critics reviews

Though the conception is rather schematic and the acting isn't all it could be, Rosi's deep-focus camera work spins a vivid, lyrical drama of regret and rebirth, abstract ethics and pinpoint sensuality.

Rosi doesn’t seem to take a stance on championing one ideology over the other, or even romanticizing one period over another, allowing for Three Brothers to be an observational portrait of a family united in grief but mostly overwhelmed by their own particular social issue predicaments.

The major antidote to the dialogue's sometimes didactic explicitness is the film's stately visual style and pacing. Three brothers heralds Rosi's decline in the 1980s and 1990s, but it also echoes the strengths of his earlier classics. The engagement with impossibly difficult issues wins through.

Any frame of the film could be hung on the wall but the political conversation is the one that Rosi is ultimately most interested in and as such is the one that he leads the audience towards. It makes for a very fine film regardless but there’s an awful lot around the edges that warrants more attention.

For too much of its length, Rosi's film threatens to disappear into the mist of its quest for Big Themes... such eternal themes of the human condition as the symbolic contrasts offered between Life and Death, Youth and Age, Innocence and Experience, often leaving you wishing for the simpler but much more compelling attractions of investigative gangster and thriller genre pieces like Lucky Luciano and The Mattei Affair.

Unfortunately, nothing in the film's present tense has anything like the force and power of these [flashback] reveries, possibly because the present-tense narrative is so schematic - so carefully routed to touch certain bases of intellectual concern - that there's no room for unprogrammed event or emotion.