Suburra

This is the powerful experience that I was expecting (in vain) from last year’s Black Mass and Legend. The Italians play the mafia game at a completely different level than the Brits and Americans. One minor evil event leads to an apocalypse that engulfs and destroys everyone. The feeling of helplessness, the inability to avoid being caught in the web of crime, grows into furious madness. Suburra is a crime thriller, so it wouldn’t be celebrated in Cannes like Matteo Garrone’s artsier Gomorra, but it’s a damn engaging crime thriller that shows some great work with characters. Excellently played characters. The story is familiar in places, but never falls into clichés. The soundtrack’s use of M83’s greatest hits is rather bizarre, which perhaps makes it all the more effective. This musical choice made me add a fifth star. (07/03/2016)

A confident European genre film that may not offer the cool heroes or the polished scripts of its classic overseas competitors, but it’s nonetheless an example of wildly essential modern filmmaking that ignores convention and serves up such an audiovisual feast that it fully fills every second of its 130-minute runtime. I enjoyed the relentless pace, the explicit sex scenes and the rather naturalistic and believable brutality, and I really liked the work with the non-native music, which paradoxically gave the film an even more distinctive character in some scenes. The story is spread out among a large cast of characters, not a single one of whom an average viewer of sound mind could sympathise with or root for, but the narrative is extremely consistent and the editor has done an excellent job. A very big surprise, our cinema has a new model in Europe, where creative inspiration doesn't mean complete sci-fi – at least so I wish... 85% (11/01/2016)

Phenomenal visual stylization, atmospheric soundtrack, or M83 as we like him best, and a precise portrayal of the underworld. All this in a gritty, uncompromising and strongly un-American delivery by the Italians, who know the mafia like few others. An interesting affair that is so pompous and self-aware that you can't take your eyes/ears off it. One of the films of the year, though it lacks an even sharper finale. (20/06/2016)

A film blurring the boundaries between concepts such as power, corruption, the church, good intentions, the mafia, usurious gangs, politics, interests, small/large fish, money, etc. Sollima continues in a style he has already successfully used in the Gomorrah series, and so this Gordian knot of destinies from the far side of Rome on the other side of Rome leads confidently and in terms of style towards a complex criminal movie. In this respect it can't deny "gomorrah's roots "(whether book, serial or movie). Like the influence of the duo Tropa de Elite or The Wire. A well-thought-out script (perhaps only the indicated church line was unused and therefore pointless), the actors, the hypnotic camera and the Martinez’s soundtrack, all this is at the highest level. The fact that it is "only" a kind of pilot for the upcoming series. It is a crime series that is one of the best ever created in this genre in recent years. And in this genre department a lot of amazing staff have been done. (01/01/2016)

It’s an audio-visually over-stylized, soft-spoken, yet more than eloquent fresco about the dark side of the eternal city that manages a quantum of characters, unprecedented violence, and metaphorical parables. Some of the threads could still use an extra knot at the end, but it is still an intense and exhausting viewing experience in the best sense. (15/01/2017)