The Traitor Reviews
November 22, 2020
Favino, a familiar face internationally as a lumpen heavy, gives a galvanising career-best performance...
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
August 14, 2020
The Traitor has all the trappings of an indecently immoral entertainment. Yet it has turned out be oddly flattened.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
July 24, 2020
A complex character study emerges, one that is inherently unflattering (Buscetta is a ruthless killer), in a restlessly intelligent film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
July 23, 2020
A brooding, two-inch-thick porterhouse steak of a movie.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
July 22, 2020
Carried by Pierfrancesco Favino's layered central performance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
March 12, 2020
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
March 9, 2020
[The Traitor] is a fascinatingly entertaining motion picture centered on a performance from Favino that's pretty darn terrific.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
March 7, 2020
"The Traitor" doesn't try to make a hero out of Buscetta and it doesn't romanticize the Mafia. It observes the awfulness and ongoing futility of a criminal culture.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
February 14, 2020
Show me a classic cosa nostra saga that doesn't affirm the importance of family and... well, I'll show you Marco Bellocchio's The Traitor, everything one hoped The Irishman would be but wasn't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
February 12, 2020
A sturdy if somewhat uninspiring Mafia biopic.
February 7, 2020
The Traitor is an exploration of betrayal, according to Bellocchio. He seems to be asking, can a man truly change the course of his life, or is it just a pretense? Unfortunately, this account of Buscetta's story doesn't really give us any answers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/4
February 5, 2020
[D]irector Marco Bellocchio enriches the on-screen bloodshed with richly detailed performances and an unpredictable energy that lifts the period crime drama above a mere gangster flick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
February 5, 2020
The biggest betrayal of "The Traitor" is its crime against the usually compelling mafia movie genre. This is an offer you can refuse.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
February 1, 2020
Favino's performance is the center of gravity for the film, which encompasses nearly a century's worth of Sicilian mafia lore. Without such a compelling lead actor to hold it all together, the focus would be lost.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
January 31, 2020
I just didn't think it was very involving... [There's] more data than a character arc.
January 31, 2020
Dense and brooding, but, like Scorsese's film, vigorously told, The Traitor also unfolds under the looming shadow of mortality, of time running out for aging kingpins, and of debts coming due.
January 31, 2020
[The Traitor] exists just outside the realm of genre movie conventions and deep inside its unreliable protagonists' hard-scrambled psyche. It's a nightmare; it's a gas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
January 30, 2020
[I]t ultimately seems as if there was a more economical, propulsive and entertaining way for a master such as Bellocchio to recount this explosive and pivotal chapter of Mafia history.
January 30, 2020
Masino dwells in an ethical gray zone, and his biography is a chiaroscuro of compromise and partial vindication. But "The Traitor" has the glow of truth.
January 28, 2020
More than anything else, and despite its focus on a small fry rather than a don, The Traitor suggests what Gotti might have looked like in assured-or maybe even just competent-hands.
Full Review
| Original Score: B-