The Traitor

Favino, a familiar face internationally as a lumpen heavy, gives a galvanising career-best performance...

The Traitor has all the trappings of an indecently immoral entertainment. Yet it has turned out be oddly flattened.

A complex character study emerges, one that is inherently unflattering (Buscetta is a ruthless killer), in a restlessly intelligent film.

A brooding, two-inch-thick porterhouse steak of a movie.

Carried by Pierfrancesco Favino's layered central performance.

There's a sharper film lurking somewhere insider... But those wanting a more detailed exploration of organized crime in Italy - and the mental trauma it inflicted on soldiers and civilians alike - would do well to make time for Bellocchio's latest.

“It wouldn’t be surprising to see ‘The Traitor’ filed in the Dad-canon of crime cinema alongside other European films like ‘Mesrine’ or ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ — films where the context is too wide to sufficiently cover…”

...movies like The Traitor are worth tracking down for their fearless adherence to the ideals of morality. This is a deluxe mob movie, done with the kind of wit, intelligence, and scrupulous spirit that make it a must see...

Marco Bellocchio’s The Traitor is his latest slice of unconformist Italian cinema whose mafia tale is a brutal knockout. It has such a rare script that goes against everything we know about conventional mob-genre film rules. It’s a cinematic miracle.

The film is dynamically suspended between the pathos of rise and fall and the monotony of daily life, though punctually subdued and understated; it flows like a Homeric poem.