"Gomorrah" (2008)

Directed by Matteo Garrone, Gomorrah is a film based on a bestseller by Roberto Saviano about the Camorra crime syndicate in Naples. It was honored with the Grand Prix at this year's Cannes Film Festival and was introduced by Martin Scorsese at a private screening at the New York Film Festival.

Gomorrah trailer

From The Guardian UK:
The action takes place mostly in and around the tenement buildings of Scampìa in Naples; Garrone presents it as a multi-stranded epic of various characters in various stages up the food chain. The mob has been split by a turf war, called a "secession", signalled in the film's first minute by a grisly gang hit on some camorristi in a tanning salon: plump, self-admiring, nude wiseguys bathed in an eerie blue light, who are shot dead by a blank-faced crew; the killers impassively deposit their weapons in a sports bag held open for them by a female associate waiting for them in the foyer. Then, and at all other times in the film, no police officers or other authority figures take any sort of effective or preventive action, and the Roman Catholic church is utterly absent. The resulting war divides loyalties, and creates ruptures and fissions that discharge individual stories like jetsam."

"And beneath all this is the corrupt business of importing waste: literally undermining the entirety of southern Italy with the reckless digging and dumping of poisonous industrial excrement, turning the nation into a gigantic public lavatory, a process facilitated by corruption, by a menacing gangster culture enforcing easy land sales, and by a cynical Italian government. The movie omits that part of Roberto Saviano's book which deals with the camorra's link with Britain. But it certainly leaves us pondering the fact that we British, and all EU members, donate the money and the political respectability which serves to cover up the whole dysfunctional business. Gomorrah is a powerful example of that thrilling current of energy which right now is lighting up Italian cinema."

Gomorrah will be shown at the Embarcadero Center Cinemas as part of the New Italian Cinema film series Sunday, November 23 at 8:45 p.m. Advance tickets are sold out, but "Rush tickets are typically available for screenings that have gone to Rush Status...Rush tickets will be sold on a first-come, first-served basis to those in line [on the evening of the screening]...CASH ONLY."