Suburra

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)

A modern mafia thriller that maps the operation of organized crime vertically across the social structure of contemporary Italy. From political and church leaders and powerful bosses to prostitutes and small-time crooks doing dirty work in the field. The only thing missing here is the counterbalance of the police and state institutions facing the mafia. The story is set in a world so deeply rooted in corruption and dirty deals that the competition within the underworld poses a much greater, if not the only, risk. Well-written and directed, it is a complex experience that is rarely seen. I have only one reservation: big predators are usually rightfully at the top of the food chain, whereas in Suburra, the nobodies triumph – and at least in one case, against the logic of the situation's development and against the nature of their personality. However, Suburra is seriously close to a five-star rating. Overall impression: 85%. (13/03/2017)

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)

It's safe to say that this gangster film has one of the more conservative audiences, and one can admire Sollima’s fatalistic lyrical approach all the more for portraying a corrupt and crime-ridden environment as an inescapable microcosm where people from all walks of life come together, united by abandonment of moral and ethical values. There are no positive heroes here, in fact almost everyone here is granted a well-deserved punishment, and as such the film accesses the viewer primarily through its mood. To do this, it uses rather atypical techniques, with many scenes lacking spatial exposition, for example. Often a scene is opened with shots of seemingly unrelated activities that gradually build up the space in which the sequence will take place. Which works mainly because those scenes are much longer than usual and, despite that very mood-setting atmosphere, are quite procedural. A perfect example is the supermarket shootout, which is an episode that takes place over four floors of a department store, though its protagonists only meet in one of the shops at the beginning. The extreme long shots occupying the generally familiar interiors of the mall and the civilian victims here straddle that very line between the criminal world and the civilian world. The resulting shape then manages to retain its bankrupt mood despite the revenge finale, because however much evil was punished, it was still just the cog in an ever-turning wheel that, with only minor variations, will continue to function forever. (27/06/2016)

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)