Rocco and His Brothers

"The Parondis' lives are difficult but gorgeous; boxing is terrible but riveting; the city offers everything even as it takes everything away."

"Today, distanced from ridiculous controversy and dislocated from the provincial politics that drive its story, this immaculately restored classic of post-WWII Italian cinema often feels like a new experience altogether."

"Turgid, overwrought, yet still profoundly affecting."

"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."

"There is in this strong and surging drama of an Italian peasant family's shattering fate in the face of the brutalising forces of unfamiliar modern city life a kind of emotional fullness and revelation that one finds in the great tragedies of the Greeks."

""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."