The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.
Garrone’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s story trembles with corporeal strangeness and unpredictability.
The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.
The Wild Pear Tree sees Nuri Bilge Ceylan in a kind of self-aware dialogue with himself about the methodologies of his work.
The most telling revelation in Tale of Tales has little to do with ugly sisters, transmogrified monsters, or angry ogres.
Garrone has a sure eye for the outlandish, but the spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them lag.
Garrone follows up Gomorrah with a more contained treatise on surveillance as transcendence and entertainment.
It may not deserve the Criterion treatment, but fans will be pleased by the solid audio/video treatment it has received.
Gomorrah probably is an important film, for the stories it tells, the conclusions it reaches, and the realities it evokes.
The problem with Gomorrah isn’t that it feels incomplete or underdeveloped.
Matteo Garrone’s gangster-as-capitalist view never softens its focus a la Traffic or turn its executions into exploitative set pieces.
Call the film Anatomy of Jenny Craig.