Critics reviews

Fans of Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, which told an even more intricate story of the Camorran crime syndicate from Naples, 200 miles up the coast, might find this equally thrilling, if far less frantic. And in its exploration of the supremacy of family when the chips are down, there are obvious comparisons to be drawn with Francis Ford Coppola's first Godfather film. This is Munzi's third picture, and one that should by all rights win him an appreciative international audience.

It may not quite have the explosive charm of some of the classics, but Black Souls is an elegant, unsettling addition to the gangster movie canon. Get on its unique wavelength, and you may find it transfixing.

Without flash, Munzi balances authenticity and poetry... Munzi doesn't foreground style for its own sake, but subtle and nuanced flourishes are present at the service of the narrative.

Black Souls has been conceived as a tragedy rather than a thriller, and the tone is appropriately melancholic. Munzi has cast the film wisely (the three leads all seem to have dropped from the same subtly rotten family tree) and he's skilled at using widescreen compositions to suggest the feelings of the people on-screen, clustering lustrous bodies and faces within the frame so that we can perceive the intimacy between them (or a lack thereof).

The biggest problem with Black Souls, which Munzi and two co-writers adapted from a novel by Gioacchino Criaco, is that it plays like a two-episode arc from The Sopranos, and not an especially memorable one. The ensemble cast is strong, and the filmmaking supple, but the narrative never quite catches fire.

While Black Souls stands its ground when walking the delicate slopes of ethnographic rendition, it fails to stand out for any other particular reason. It is beautifully lensed, soberly acted and directed, but somehow lacks that extra gear that would help it move away from the contrived machinations that the genre itself seems to impose.