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100A small comic masterpiece that dares to deal with that of which many Sicilians dare not speak: the Mafia.
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Lattuada has adapted a gritty neorealist style to suit his dark comedy and is in full command in the final half hour, when he ups the ante in surprising ways.
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100A magnificent film almost no one knows about, this hidden classic offers a wider variety of pleasures than most contemporary works can even aspire to.
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91Mafioso does more than cast its fascinating shadow over "The Godfather." It captures, in a stark yet haunting way, the indelible fact that no man is born a mobster.
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91It's a marvelous performance in a marvelous movie, one that sneaks up on you while you're watching it.
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91The film combines farcical and sinister tones, as well as textures of high polish and captured-in-the-raw neorealism, and it simply brims with energy and surprises.
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90Sordi is an elegant comic actor in the vein of America's William Powell; the world may confound him, but it can never rumple him.
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90The movie is at once a giddy mixture of farce, satire and opera buffa and a closely observed drama of social dislocation and cultural confusion.
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90Mafioso may have been made in another era, but it stands as a classy, even radical rebuke to the film school posers who keep recycling the same tired gangster tropes.
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90Filmed in a hot and bleached black-and-white, it manages to swerve from culture-clashing farce to alarming suspense without losing control.
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89This is the sort of masterpiece that will obliterate memories of lesser, later efforts in the "meeting the parents" comedy lineage. Brilliant.
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88Mafioso is shaped like a comedy, and it is one, but its intentionally jarring clashes of tone and rhythm are truly out there.
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88Mafioso is the missing link in the mob movie arc.
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88Mafioso isn't a straight black satire of Sicilian culture so much as a suspenseful near-tragedy leavened by the zesty, irreverent wit that helped define the golden age of Italian comedies.
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80That's the beauty of Mafioso: that what begins as a comedy of disconnection becomes a tragicomedy of connection -- of roots that go deep and branches that span continents.
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80Alberto Lattuada's tricky-to-parse Mafioso dates from 1962 but, with its abrupt tonal shifts and disturbing existential premise, this nearly forgotten dark comedy could be the most modern (or at least modernist) movie in town.
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80[Sordi] lifts buffoonery to the level of high art.
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A more visually conscious stylist than most Italian commercial directors of the period, Lattuada remains largely unknown in the U.S., though in Europe he's been touted as the great eclectic talent of the postwar Italian cinema.
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75Satire is at the core of Mafioso, whether in establishing the by-now-stereotypical images of Sicilian peasants or the gripping arms of the Mafia.
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75Mafioso starts out as a comedy of manners before turning into a mob thriller that brings Nino to Bergen County, N.J. When he gets there, look for a man reading The Post on a street corner.
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75The matchless Alberto Sordi - a contemporary of Peters Sellers and a progenitor of Steve Martin - stars as the buffoon Everyman, Antonio Badalamenti, a perfectly poised figure destined for the pratfall.
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 2 out of 2
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Mixed: 0 out of 2
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Negative: 0 out of 2
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AndrewK.7
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JohnA.10