CRIME WAVE

Few films of recent years feel more urgent than Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah. A devastating inside look at organized crime in contemporary Naples, Gomorrah is based on the book of the same name by Italian undercover reporter Roberto Saviano, who had to go into hiding after its publication. Garrone’s film, consisting of five interconnected stories, makes cinematically vivid the Mafia underworld that Saviano exposed, a crime syndicate whose tendrils snake from the poorest tenements to the highest fashion circles. Gomorrah—which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and has garnered numerous film awards around the world since—is contemporary cinema at its finest, a virtuosic, shockingly realistic look at how violence shapes our world.

Martin Scorsese was so taken with Gomorrah that he lent his name to the film’s U.S. release, as you’ll see in this gripping trailer.