The Traitor
57th New York Film Festival
September 27 - October 13, 2019
In Marco Bellocchio’s compelling, decades-spanning drama, Pierfrancesco Favino commands the screen as real-life figure Tommaso Buscetta, the mafia boss turned informant who helped take down a large swath of organized crime leaders in Sicily in the eighties.
Ends Thursday!
Since the galvanizing burst of his unforgettable debut feature Fists in the Pocket (NYFF3), Marco Bellocchio has remained an Italian auteur of rigor and fury, representing social unrest in stories that range from the intimate to the epochal. In his 80th year, he has returned with one of his most compelling films. Pierfrancesco Favino commands the screen throughout this decades-spanning true-life narrative as Tommaso Buscetta, the mafia boss turned informant who helped take down a large swath of organized crime leaders in Sicily in the eighties. In one fully realized, impressively staged scene after another, including the notorious Maxi Trial, overseen by Judge Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi), Bellocchio interrogates received ideas about loyalty that so many other movies of this genre use to romanticize their characters. This is a very different kind of mafia drama, one that has the structure of a procedural but coasts on the waves of psychological portraiture. A Sony Pictures Classics release. An NYFF57 selection.
Watch a special introduction from the director at NYFF57.
A stellar accomplishment... makes you feel like you’ve never seen a mafia movie before.
—Olivier Assayas
One of the first unmissable movies of the year.
—Simon Abrams, RogerEbert.com
Show-stopping... a handsomely shot, true-crime gangster movie.
—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Absolutely gripping... a big, brash operatic extravaganza
—Barbara Scharres, RogerEbert.com
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