GOMORRAH World Cinema

We’ve seen the story on screen before: first a breakdown in loyalties among crime gongs , then a wave of unthinkable violence . But writer-director Matteo Garrone injects this tale- winner of Cannes’s Grand Prize-with an epic Balzacian vision. Garrone adapted Roberto Saviano’s sensational best-selling investigative account of Naples’s organized crime organizations (a book that made author Saviano both an international figure and a target of an ongoing Mob hit), and he directs with considerable, at times gut-wrenching , verve and poise. GOMORRAH tells five stories, each of which presents us with rich characters in fresh situations. Don Ciro (Gianfelice Imparato) is an exhausted, frightened bagman whose job is buying Mob control over fear-paralyzed slum dwellers. The tailor Pasquale (Salvatore Cantalupo) hopes to get his designs out of a Mob-owned factory. And the entrepreneurial Franco (Toni Servillo) trades in garbage and toxic waste; his smooth philosophical grin seems to be the very symbol of the terrifying, inescapable weight of corruption. Vivid, fast-paced and unsettling, GOMORRAH is the most ambitious vision of the consequences of the Mob yet put to film.