"Sidesteps grandiose gestures and statements in favor of a grimly matter-of-fact chronicle of how pervasive the Mafia influence has become." - Fernando F. Croce

The details of these characters aren't important, it's the environment that surrounds them that the story finds root in.

Enlightening insight into a truly horrific world. The combination of utterly believable performance and documentary style meant that Gomorrah was one of the few film experiences where I genuinely felt I was watching reality.

I appreciated the effort to avoid romanticism, but I didn't find the final product either entertaining or thought-provoking. Occupies a space between drama and documentary which makes you wish the director had committed himself to one or the other. In the interest of full disclosure, I waited a year to see this, so my disappointment is partially due to high expectations.

Has many elements of a good, meaningful film, but it doesn't come together into entertainment or education. All this has been covered before in other films, and I didn't care about the characters. The central ones, being terrorized and disenfranchised by the mafia presence, act like those people in 80's horror movies who refuse to even believe the monster exists, or the ones who think everyone's being whiny babies and they'll just go take it on alone. Yeah. You do that.

A sombre and brutal mood pervades the film and it offers no sense of hope. But that is reality. And that is what makes the film compelling.

The concept of filming an entire city run on sin is amazing and the very structure of the film is brimming with an unusual level of overawing detail. Unfortunately, the film misses the pulse of humanity and there is little empathy that is to be felt for the victims and the criminals alike. But maybe that's the point.

I really liked it.

After the film I had to go back and remind myself I was watching actors. Completely compelling mobster flick: brutal, creepy, horror, nightmare. A film about the Neapolitan organized-crime syndicate the Camorra, their mobster-poisoned soil, the mobsters sucking in the youth and bull-dozing away their corpses. Remember to come up for air-- if you can.

Good god, this movie is absolutely hopeless.

A gem of the modern cinema, Matteo Garrone creates for the audience exactly the right sort of Mafia film; not too much violence; not too leery; just the right amount of business talk among leaders & an unobtrusive visual style. By providing ruthless insight into the lives of the variously dissimilar characters affected by Italian crime syndicates, this film is able to humanely depict the sort of social wreckage Organised Crime creates within communities in an engagingly honest and moving way.

This is the Italian neorealism film of a modern era, capturing the essence of the genre heavily popular in the 1940s: an open-ended, non-narrative structure, as a series of loosely-connected events that have no beginning, nor an end; a depiction of Southern Italy in the form of a slice of life, the reflection of daily ongoings not glamourized nor overdramatized in any fashion; and the use of amateur and non-professional actors. A brutal, startling look at the Comorra, yet poignant and brilliant.

Very realistic insight in the wheeling and dealing of the Italian mafia from the perspective of the actual 'bad' guys. It's not about the story and a plot, but about the actions and motivations of the people themselves. Great watch.

I don't understand why people complain about a film not having a central connecting narrative. In this film the contrasting stories all really play a part in amplifying values of trust and ethics, and consequences.

Visually interesting, but not compelling in any way. It's kinda like City of God, that's all I can really say about it.

I find it terribly pointless: I didn't feel anything emotionally, I didn't learn anything I couldn't imagine about the camorra and I almost didn't get the relation between the things in the movie. I could only say: "oh yeah, camorra is bad and everywhere". People said it was too hard, don't know why, and I also can't understand why camorra was so angry with the creators of the book and movie.