Weekend Movie Forecast: The International or Gomorrah

After winning the Grand Prize at Cannes last year and premiering here at the New York Film Festival, Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah, which weaves together five stories about criminal life in and around a bizarre-looking Naples housing project, opens today. Set in a world where petty criminals and mafioso alike all take their cues from American gangster films, the hip-level film is beautifully gritty without glorifying its subject matter. And it's based on a book about Italian organized crime that forced its author into protective custody.

J. Hoberman writes, "Garrone's movie... is less an adaptation of the book than the successful decanting of its toxic fumes... Crime bosses and crooked pols are off-screen. Instead, we have the residents of a vast, moldering housing estate in Scampia, a Naples suburb reputedly home to the world's largest open-air drug market. Set in the middle of nowhere, this poured-concrete maze is part Aztec pyramid, part minimum-security pen...An exemplar for disastrous urban planning in its failed attempt to provide light and space for its inhabitants, the housing block serves Garrone as an allegorical landscape."