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Rocco and His Brothers

Play trailer Poster for Rocco and His Brothers Released Jun 26, 1961 2h 35m Drama Play Trailer Watchlist
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90% Tomatometer 31 Reviews 94% Popcornmeter 2,500+ Ratings
Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), an impoverished Italian mother, moves to Milan with her close-knit family of five sons to find opportunity in the big city. A heated rivalry begins when two of Rosaria's boys -- Rocco (Alain Delon) and Simone (Renato Salvatori) -- fall for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a beautiful prostitute with whom each has an affair. As soft-spoken Rocco and brutal Simone both pursue Nadia in their own way, tension between them threatens to tear the family apart.
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Rocco and His Brothers

Critics Reviews

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Derek Prouse Sight & Sound [Rocco] is a work which shows Visconti addicted both to romantic melodrama and to contemporary social drama. It is through his own prodigious conviction and authority that these elements can be reconciled without arousing a fatal mistrust. Feb 10, 2020 Full Review Kenneth Turan Los Angeles Times "Rocco and His Brothers" is a film both authentic and ambitious, a classic that is as adept at telling individual stories as it is in drawing larger parallels from them. Oct 22, 2015 Full Review Pauline Kael The New Yorker Visconti's methods are still partly neorealist, but the scale of the film is huge and operatic, and it loses the intimacy of the best neorealist films, and their breath of life. Oct 8, 2015 Full Review Yasser Medina Cinefilia A mayor work of Italian neorealism, in which Visconti, with refined aesthetics and formidable performances, conceives an extremely emotional portrait about the disintegration of the working-class family. [Full review in Spanish] Rated: 9/10 Jul 4, 2024 Full Review Penelope Gilliatt Observer (UK) It is made with a sheer passion that makes most current filmmaking look puny; and though it depicts inarticulate people in a social predicament that is all too realistic, it does them the dignity of giving them a stylised eloquence. Mar 6, 2024 Full Review Brian Susbielles InSession Film Blood is thicker than water, but it is tested all the way to its breaking point in a family’s struggle to adapt to Northern ways of life. Mar 7, 2023 Full Review Read all reviews

Audience Reviews

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Audience Member A long film that never feels like it's dragging. The only downside is that things get kind of melodramatic occasionally but generally it's fairly enrapturing stuff as the plot unwinds, carried mainly by the live triangle between two brothers and a whore. Sadly Claudia Cardinale's role is marginal but wowzers I mean she's always next level beauty. Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member A beautiful and captivating story of a family, which had to make its living in grim and hostile conditions of a new home. The performances of Delon and Salvatori are outstanding, though all the cast is superb. Despite its more than 2 hours length the movie just flies by, which marks the perfect direction by Visconti. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/05/23 Full Review dave s In Luchino Visconti's sprawling Rocco and his Brothers, the Parondi family leave behind their rural roots to move to Milan, where the matriarch of the family hopes to give her five sons a better opportunity at success in life. It's a simple story at its core, but ambitious in the way it deals with loyalty within the family and the struggle to survive in what is essentially a foreign land. The black and white cinematography is striking at times and Visconti's staging is excellent. The only possible drawbacks are the length of the film and the overwrought final act, but these are minor complaints about an otherwise excellent film. Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/30/23 Full Review William L Rocco and His Brothers is certainly a sprawling and busy epic focusing on the working class of Italy in the '60s, and, from a more universial perspective, an exploration of the family structure, romance, and individuality as traditionally rural families found themselves pushed by circumstance into urban lifestyles. While it draws strength from its contemporary setting, the film just doesn't seem to be the masterpiece that everyone claims it to be, given its unnecessarily prolonged length and overreliance on melodrama; neither the love triangle plot that binds together the major narrative nor the characters involved are particularly strong, and many of the scenes are downright cheesy. Ambitious and intermittently successful, Visconti may be lauded as having contributed a major work to Italian Neorealism, but frankly I don't see it as a really compelling film. (3.5/5) Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 12/28/20 Full Review Audience Member Extraordinarily well acted and extremely captivating. Amazing performance by Delo. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 11/01/20 Full Review tom I just watched the restored version of this film. Another masterpiece by Luchino Visconti. Rated 5 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews
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Movie Info

Synopsis Rosaria Parondi (Katina Paxinou), an impoverished Italian mother, moves to Milan with her close-knit family of five sons to find opportunity in the big city. A heated rivalry begins when two of Rosaria's boys -- Rocco (Alain Delon) and Simone (Renato Salvatori) -- fall for Nadia (Annie Girardot), a beautiful prostitute with whom each has an affair. As soft-spoken Rocco and brutal Simone both pursue Nadia in their own way, tension between them threatens to tear the family apart.
Director
Luchino Visconti
Producer
Goffredo Lombardo
Distributor
Astor Pictures Corporation
Production Co
Les Films Marceau, Titanus
Genre
Drama
Original Language
Italian
Release Date (Theaters)
Jun 26, 1961, Wide
Release Date (Streaming)
Jan 1, 2009
Runtime
2h 35m
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