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Created Mar 08, 2009 08:19PM PST • Edited Sep 10, 2023 07:34AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   A new addition to the canon of great mafia movies, Gomorra entertainingly details the mundane savagery and sociopathic activities of Italy’s oldest organized crime organization. Darkly funny, Gomorra brings to life Roberto Saviano’s hugely important book about “Italy’s other Mafia” – the Camorra.

   The movie’s title plays on the phonetic similarities of Camorra and Gomorrah. Where Sodom has an aggressively homosexual connotation, now we can associate its sister city as one of pervasive criminality and self-interest run wild.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Most of the cast are amateurs, though you wouldn’t know it. Natural and authentic, they ground the movie in the apparent reality of this strange and violent place, not unlike the amateurs at the center of Slumdog Millionaire.

   One scene in particular stands out as a quintessential Mafia movie moment: two Camorra bosses are arguing about what to do with a couple of young hotheads, conducting their “meeting” around the bed of an elderly dying boss. The dying old guy occasionally rasps out declarations in a voice that Brando’s Don Corleone would hope to emulate, all the while gesturing with upturned hands. Classic.

   How real are the actors? It turns out that three of them have been pinched for mob activities just since the movie’s release. Doesn’t get more real than that.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Presented by Martin Scorsese are the first words on screen. Expectations elevated, the movie ably fulfills them. A series of parallel storylines play out, ultimately coming together in an inevitably bloody conclusion. The sub-titled Italian is occasionally hard to follow, in part because these guys have an often humorously idiosyncratic way of looking at and describing things, yet the movie is easy enough to follow.

    Director Matteo Garrone and primary writer Roberto Saviano have crafted a fictionalized narrative of a real world milieu that they variously refer to as a New Italian Epic and/or an Unidentified Narrative Object. Whatever. It works, dropping we viewers into a strange, teeming and violent world in a most engaging way.

    In its meandering, parallel storylines, the movie bears a resemblance to Crash and Babel. But where those exercises in guilt and annoyance felt contrived, Gomorra feels organic and authentic.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Really Great 4.5

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Sordid 2.7

    Everybody dies. Not really, but they expect that they will, though they don’t know when the bullet through the brain is coming their way. Be ready.

17. Sex Erotic 2.6

18. Violence Brutal 3.5

19. Rudeness Salty 2.0

21. Reality

    Natural 1.0

    The movie lays out a damning and profoundly sad case against the Camorra. Not only do they eat their young (metaphorically speaking), they poison the population with rampant narcotics and wildly improper disposal of toxic waste. Roberto Saviano, the author and screen writer who lays all this out, is now in permanent police protection for exposing these cretins as the societal leeches they are.

    Because of his propriety and rectitude, I’m choosing to judge the movie as entirely natural, not taking any liberties with the reality of the Camorra. Amongst the fascinating details the movie illuminates are the ways in which boys are recruited into the Camorra, first as lookouts, later as mules and finally as enforcers.

22. Circumstantial Natural 1.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0