Gomorrah
Metascore
87 out of 100

Universal acclaim - based on 30 Critics

Critic score distribution:
  1. Positive: 28 out of 30
  2. Mixed: 1 out of 30
  3. Negative: 1 out of 30
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  1. Chicago Sun-Times
    Reviewed by: Roger Ebert
    100
    Gomorrah looks grimy and sullen, and has no heroes, only victims. That is its power.
  2. Rolling Stone
    Reviewed by: Peter Travers
    88
    So fasten your seat belts for Gomorrah, just snubbed in the wussy Oscar race for Best Foreign Film (so you know it's dynamite).
  3. Entertainment Weekly
    Reviewed by: Lisa Schwarzbaum
    100
    Naples-born Servillo is a national star, famed as a theater, opera, and film director as well as an actor. And he's got the face of a mensch (or a Madoff) -- which makes his embodiment of criminal banality all the more identifiable, as well as horrifying.
  4. Los Angeles Times
    Reviewed by: Kenneth Turan
    100
    The fingerprints of the Camorra are everywhere, this film wants us to know, and its grip is lethal.
  5. Wall Street Journal
    Reviewed by: Joe Morgenstern
    80
    The malignity can be oppressive -- this is a far cry from Fellini finding poignant uplift in the slums -- but the dramatic structure is complex, the details are instructive, and the sense of tragedy is momentous.
  6. Austin Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Marc Savlov
    89
    This isn't some pomo arthouse picture looking to score points by subverting the gangster paradigm; it's a killer film about killers who idolize film but are unable or unwilling to parse the doom that always crops up come Act III.
  7. Philadelphia Inquirer
    Reviewed by: Steven Rea
    88
    A frightening portrait of corruption, cynicism, intimidation, greed and violence, Gomorrah is tough stuff.
  8. Boston Globe
    Reviewed by: Wesley Morris
    100
    Both a staggering realist thriller and a jeremiad.
  9. Chicago Reader
    Reviewed by: J.R. Jones
    70
    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
  10. Portland Oregonian
    Reviewed by: Shawn Levy
    83
    The sense of inescapability, the mood of capitulation and resignation, becomes the story. What is being made clear is the thoroughgoing rot of a civilization; there is literally no place to find peace, solace or consolation.
  11. Christian Science Monitor
    Reviewed by: Peter Rainer
    83
    Garrone's messy storytelling compounds an already messy history. He's a powerful filmmaker, though, and a fearless one.
  12. The A.V. Club
    Reviewed by: Scott Tobias
    91
    Gomorrah takes place in a world where decency can't take root and we can only watch in horror as crime overwhelms society's most vulnerable-- women, children, law-abiding citizens, and the conscientious few who want to get out of the game.
  13. New York Post
    Reviewed by: V.A. Musetto
    88
    The film's disclosure that Camorra money is involved with the reconstruction of New York City's Ground Zero will give viewers something to think about.
  14. Chicago Tribune
    Reviewed by: Michael Phillips
    100
    The characters in Gomorrah may lack an extra dramatic dimension: Garrone errs, if anything, on the side of detachment. Yet that detachment is also the key to the film's success. There's so little hooey and melodramatic head-banging here.
  15. Salon.com
    Reviewed by: Andrew O'Hehir
    90
    This film never feels like copycat Americana to me. Its vision of the bleak, ruined, urban-cum-rural landscape of Naples and environs is distinctively European and postmodern, redolent of the spiritual and physical desolation Antonioni captured so memorably in "Red Desert."
  16. Baltimore Sun
    Reviewed by: Michael Sragow
    100
    For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic.
  17. Village Voice
    Reviewed by: J. Hoberman
    80
    This corrosive, slapdash, grimly exciting exposé of organized crime in and around Naples comes on like "Mean Streets" cubed.
  18. The New York Times
    Reviewed by: Manohla Dargis
    90
    Part of what's bracing about Gomorrah, and makes it feel different from so many American crime movies, is both its deadly serious take on violence and its global understanding of how far and wide the mob's tentacles reach, from high fashion to the very dirt.
  19. Seattle Post-Intelligencer
    Reviewed by: Sean Axmaker
    75
    It's all about waste and destruction, and not just the toxic waste -- illegally dumped in landfills -- that is poisoning the farmland and the aquifers in the region.
  20. L.A. Weekly
    Reviewed by: Ella Taylor
    80
    The five interwoven narratives in this visceral but disciplined and beautifully acted movie show to devastating effect how ordinary men and women -- and especially vulnerable boys desperate for masculine role models -- get caught up in the seductive violence and are ruthlessly destroyed by the network's hardened henchmen.
  21. New York Magazine (Vulture)
    Reviewed by: David Edelstein
    50
    Gomorrah isn't memorable. The structure feels random, and the characters remain at arm's length. Next to HBO's "The Wire," which depicted an enormous financial ladder and also brought to life the characters on every rung, the movie is small potatoes: excellent journalism, so-so art.
  22. The New Yorker
    Reviewed by: Anthony Lane
    90
    The result 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, the author's courageous toil.
  23. Film Threat
    Reviewed by: Pete Vonder Haar
    20
    Clearly, Gomorrah is supposed to represent the best of today’s European cinema...and if this is the best, I would hate to imagine the worst! Gomorrah is a boring mess focusing on how the mob in today’s Naples has its tentacles stretched far and wide
  24. San Francisco Chronicle
    Reviewed by: Walter Addiego
    100
    This is a vision of hell conveyed in a simple, documentary style, far removed from the sumptuous American Mafia fables.
  25. The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    Reviewed by: Jennie Punter
    100
    An unforgettable portrayal of the unglamorous gangster life, which is often short and never sweet.
  26. Empire
    Reviewed by: Damon Wise
    80
    A sombre, slow, but well-paced study of organised crime in urban Naples that leaves a very grim taste in the mouth.
  27. The Hollywood Reporter
    Reviewed by: Natasha Senjanovic
    100
    Powerful, stripped to its very essence and featuring a spectacular cast (of mostly non-professionals), Matteo Garrone's sixth feature film Gomorra goes beyond Tarrantino's gratuitous violence and even Scorsese's Hollywood sensibility in depicting the everyday reality of organized crime's foot soldiers.
  28. Time
    Reviewed by: Richard Corliss and Mary Corliss
    100
    Probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history.
  29. Washington Post
    Reviewed by: Jan Stuart
    100
    This vibrantly disorienting cinematic import reinvents the vocabulary of the crime drama with a painterly eye and a feverish documentary style.
  30. Variety
    Reviewed by: Jay Weissberg
    80
    Utilizing a mesmerizing documentary style that studiously avoids glamorizing the horrors, Garrone cherrypicks episodes from Saviano's muckraking tract, building to a chillingly matter-of-fact crescendo of violence, though interwoven tales tend to dissipate the full force of the criminal Camorra families' insidious control.

User Reviews

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User Score
6.7 out of 10

Generally favorable reviews- based on 55 Ratings

User score distribution:
  1. Positive: 17 out of 22
  2. Mixed: 2 out of 22
  3. Negative: 3 out of 22
  1. Jeffjef
    5
    Completely overrated. how can so many film critics get this completely wrong. the only strong point is that it has good cinematography. you know where the plot is going and don't feel a connection to anyone because of the way the story is told.… Full Review »
  2. Nesbitt10
    9
    Gomorrah is the Biblical city synonymous with unrepentant sinners. As title of the Italian film "Gomorrah", it is a chilling descriptor and a play on words of the "Camorra"- the organized crime syndicate that controls the city of Naples and the surrounding countryside. Detailing daily life inside a criminal state--it's a new sort of gangster film for America to ponder. No matter how many mafia films you have seen, you have never seen anything like "Gomorrah." It is a desolate film--devoid of hope, and explores a brutally violent way of life with no heroes, just victims.
    The film is based on Roberto Saviano's book "Gomorrah" (2006 Bestseller)-a first-person journey into the many hearts of the beast, and to this day lives under police protection. The film retains the book's you-are-there immersion. But director Matteo Garrone splinters the narrative, then traces it along different commercial channels industrial waste disposal, the garment business, construction, and the drug wars.
    Poison is the lifeblood of what Saviano simply refers to as "The System"-crack cocaine, chemical waste, tainted money, and creeping corruption. "Gomorrah" opens with a standard-issue mob hit and then, without ever pausing to explain who wanted whom dead, goes on to map the web of relations by which the Camorra ensnares its subjects (many of whom are played by nonprofessional locals). Crime bosses and crooked pols are off-screen. Instead, we have the residents of a vast, moldering housing estate in Scampia, a Naples suburb reputedly home to the world's largest open-air drug market. A model for disastrous urban planning in its failed attempt to provide light and space for its inhabitants. Set in the middle of nowhere, this poured-concrete maze is part Aztec pyramid, part minimum-security pen. Narrow catwalks and alleys, placing kids in cavities of the structure as lookouts, as delivery boys, as enforcers. "Gomorrah" draws a generational line to connect middle-aged men to young ones. It's easy to see how a kid like Tito (Salvatore Abruzzese), the delivery boy for drug dealers, could possibly become a toxic-waste baron like Franco (Toni Servillo) or, worse, a middleman like Ciro. Any way you cut it, these kids don't have a chance.
    Garrone skips from one Camorra scam to another, all plots climaxing amid inexplicable warfare in a more or less simultaneous reckoning. "Gomorrah's" episodic structure is in some ways comparable to Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." Despite its vivid characterizations, the movie stays on the surface-or, rather, it maintains a feel of "street level occupation." The undistinguished visual style is predicated on a jittery wide-screen SteadiCam. There's a sense that Garrone's bobbing and weaving camera is just hanging with the homies-a strategy used by Saviano in his first-person book.
    While the movie is yet another saga of killing and corruption--unlike so many of its ancestors, from "Scarface" to "Goodfellas," the crime is organized around money--yet we never sense any riches. Matteo Garrone is an exhilarating filmmaker, but "Gomorrah" is not a sensationalistic film. Two younger boys often quote Al Pacino in "Scarface"--and some of the thugs have a hip-hop sensibility, but the fabulousness of "gangsta life" is merely a mirage that insults the day-to-day realities. It's a chilling experience, to sit comfortably in our chairs watching the ugliness that human nature can dish out. When a man on a motorbike pulls alongside a moving sedan and opens fire, it's not the thrill of violence you feel. It's the awful shock, the immediacy of the disruption. Nothing sweet or serene in this movie stays that way for long. There is no Hollywood gloss, or international stars involved in the project. Just a sense of gritty realism that pierces through a bullet proof vest, should we be fortunate enough to be wearing one.    … Full Review »
  3. ImUnavailable
    8
    A grim and uncompromising look at the human cost of the Italian criminal underworld. It is undeniably well directed and well acted. The multiple plots give scope to the story even if it does meanders occasionally.… Full Review »
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