Rocco and His Brothers

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2 hr. 35 min.

Drama

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90%

30 Reviews

Tomatometer

94%

2,500+ Ratings

Audience Score

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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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

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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

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Fra B

My favourite Italian movie, Visconti deals with sociology issues and psychology fascinating characters at the same time in a story that requires some patience in the beginning but whose dramatic intensity is heavier than that of any other neorealist movie (... also somehow this is a boxe movie).

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

03/07/21

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

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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

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Audience Member

Extraordinarily well acted and extremely captivating. Amazing performance by Delo.

Rated 5 out of 5 stars

11/01/20

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Luchino Visconti

Director

Alain Delon

Rocco Parondi

Renato Salvatori

Simone Parondi

Annie Girardot

Nadia

Katina Paxinou

Rosaria Parondi

Roger Hanin

Morini

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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

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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

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Pauline Kael

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

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

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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

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Mattie Lucas

From the Front Row

Even at nearly three hours long, Rocco and His Brothers is a fleet-footed, intensely realized work

Rated: 3.5/4

Jun 3, 2019

Full Review

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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
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

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