A few frames back, I posted on the striking Italian film "Gomorrah." Now the estimable Anthony Lane joins in the plaudits in The New Yorker:

Gomorrah is a beautiful movie. That may sound perverse, given its welter of drive-by shootings and toxic dumps, but what is most impressive about Garrone [the movie's director] is his refusal to let his style be bulldozed by the runaway violence of his subject. This is organized crime. Not for him the panicky, catch-me-if-you-can approach of a film like City of Godor, indeed, like Slumdog Millionaire, which next to Gomorrah seems like an adventure vacation. The mobsters may be trigger-frenzied, but the movie takes constant care, with a kind of appalled wonder, to survey the arenas of their mayhem. Don Ciro does the rounds of Scampia, a northern suburb of Naples, where people live and die in tower blocks that look like ruined ziggurats. Most of the camerawork is handheld, but now and then we pull back for a lofted view: a panorama as unruffled as an Andreas Gursky photograph.

And he adds, resignedly:

It failed to make the nominations for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards: the usual travesty.

Has anyone seen the film yet?

Robert P. Imbelli, a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, is a longtime Commonweal contributor.

Also by this author
© 2024 Commonweal Magazine. All rights reserved. Design by Point Five. Site by Deck Fifty.