Word: film
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...latter would be Louis Salinger (Owen), an Interpol detective, ex-Scotland Yard, who at the start of the film is monitoring a clandestine meeting between one of his agents, Schumer (Ian Burfield), and a potential IBBC informant, whom the assignation has made very nervous. "You need to relax," the agent tells the informant, who replies, "I relax better tense." Adrenaline levels hardly matter to these two. In short order, they'll be killed: one in a "freak road accident" and the other, the Interpol agent, crumpling dead on the street. Salinger gets to see that in person...
...Less a traditional crime film than an as-told-to social document, Gomorrah reveals the reach of a business that has poisoned an entire region; for Camorra is both a crime syndicate and one of the nation's largest employers - southern Italy's own stimulus package. Where else in a sluggish economy can a young man find work? (In the movie, a college graduate, lured into a job supervising the dumping of toxic waste, decides to quit the business. His padrone, disgusted, spells out what awaits him: "Go make pizzas.") When everyone in town is either a gangster...
...take Tykwer's film even half seriously, it will be like one of those horror movies that you leave suspecting that the crazy, ingenious superkiller is waiting for you outside. A warning, then, to the susceptible: after seeing The International, don't dare...
...Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, called Gomorra in Italy and based on the best-selling exposé by Roberto Saviano, is probably the bleakest, least sentimental study of the Mafia in Italian or American film history. In its depiction of the Camorra crime family, there are no good guys, no crusading cops, no mama pleading with her son to stay out of the rackets. There's also no Mr. Big, Dr. No or Don Corleone stroking a house cat and intoning gritty or pearly aphorisms. The movie stays at street level, showing the lower- and middle-rung employees enmeshed...
...style of Garrone's film - long, episodic, solidly acted by a mix of familiar screen faces and nonprofessionals - is no more than efficient. But because violence erupts without warning, Gomorrah keeps you alert through the mundane parts. In the first scene, meaty men get gunned down in a tanning salon. That sets the movie's dramatic coordinates. People die stepping outside their front door, or in a whorehouse, or just fooling around on the street. In a typical crime movie, there's a suspenseful buildup to the bog kills. Here, death explodes prosaically, capriciously, as in Baghdad or Kabul...