Popular reviews

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★½ 7

  An audacious, controversial auteur from the very beginning, providing Bertolucci his first film industry participation as an assistant director, I thought, with all the naivety in the world, that this being Pasolini's debut and an early 60s film, there would be more air to breath and more compassion. Naturally, I was proven wrong, as the auteur explored, since he ever grabbed a camera, the darkest corners of humanity. The film is endlessly depressing, partially derivative from the works and themes of the Italian fathers of Neorealism, but more exploitative from the viewpoint of a morally degraded Rome, relentless towards its characters, in a world where true friendships do not exist and where tragedies are expressed through Bach's music.

  Such pessimism…

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  Review by Graham Williamson ★★★★ 4

  You can tell by the way Pasolini films people - full face, looking deeply at them - that he loves them. He's just often disappointed with them, is all. His debut would be an interesting double-bill with Salo, his last film; watch as the little, despairing allusions to fascism and forced labour in Accattone become all-consuming terrors.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★★ 20

  The sermon from the mount is transposed to mere mounds of rubble outside Rome in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Accattone.” 

  The first film completed by the poet-novelist Pasolini is set amongst the borgate hovels that remained but a footnote in the escalating Italian era of the economic miracle. While reduced to fine print in the materialistic boom economy, Pasolini relates the stories of these struggling pimps, prostitutes, and destitute children with a mythic and biblical grandiosity. 

  “Accattone” at first appears to be an entry in neorealism; filmed in the bombed out ruins of houses and featuring the lower classes. Then… the Bach begins. 

  As the men who sell the bodies of women slam fists into each other, scrambling amidst the dirt,…

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  Review by Jerry ★★★½ 6

  Bound by the life he has been given, Accattone is a saint of circumstance. He is caught in that most vicious cycle of all: poverty, and therefore makes decisions based on where he has found himself. When we first meet him, he is living the high life; wearing a fresh white sweater, a gold chain and a smile. As the picture progresses, he finds his luck slowly beginning to dwindle, but it begs the question: did he ever have any luck to begin with? Or was he placed on this planet to suffer?

  Pasolini offers up a harsh tale of redemption in Accattone, wherein death is the single release from the agony of life as a part-time pimp and full-time…

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  Review by Sam ★★★★

  An incredible debut movie really is with the movie dealing with extreme poverty in Italy. It does an excellent job into delving into this showing the desperation accattone delves into just to make a life for himself often having to be forced to put others in dangers to keep himself alive. It often is bleak throughout and I’m presuming must of been an important influential film at the time in Italy. The cinematography is also great Pasolini definitely has a natural talent for film and this movie shows it.

  Also the guy who plays accattone brings so much to this role he really is a talented actor.

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  Review by nick ★★★★

  Accattone, Pier Paolo Pasolini's debut, is a strong, hard-hitting tribute to Vittorio De Sica's neorealistic legacy, and interestingly the name of the leading character in this happens to be Vittorio too.

  A pessimistic character study of a highly flawed, yet fascinating antihero, Accattone takes its time to shed light on the bleak state of post-war Italy, where poverty and crime were rampant and people suffered. The daily routines of a jobless social outcast feel so riveting with Pasolini's vibrant sense of scenery, and the budding homoeroticism throughout truly paves the way for his later works.

  My favorite scene has to be the dream sequence, where Pasolini approached the theme of life and death with such a poetic and melancholy tone, that it makes the finale all the more heartbreaking to witness. Recommended.

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★

  Fellini removing his name from any attachment to this film out of distaste for its script is a bit rich as this really just delivers the coup de grâce on neorealism's best and worst traits after the likes of Rossellini, De Sica and Fellini himself had already dealt mortal blows to the genre. Like Buñuel's Los Olvidados, this punctures neorealism's sanctimony regarding the suffering poor, depicting the people being left out by Italy's postwar recovery as reduced to bestial survivalism, but Pasolini nonetheless approaches this with an empathy that renders its protagonist's vulgar spiral as a kind of passion play, immediately nailing the sacred and profane provocation that would make Pasolini such a lightning rod for the rest of his…

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  Review by Lowe McKee 13

  “Italy awakens,” one of the nameless pimps says early in the film, yawning, stretching out his arms to start the day. Awakening to another day of aggravated aimlessness; scrounging for a little bit of money or a little bit of food, just enough to keep from starving. Italy awakens to a new day. Well, the same day, really. Same as the last, same as the next.

  Pasolini’s Italy is a land of disillusionment, anger, and violence accompanied by the beautiful, somber sounds of Bach. Italy awakens to inescapable poverty. Here, you can either slave away working for a measly 1,000 lire a day like a sucker (the equivalent of a dollar or two, from what I could gather), or you…

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  Review by Alice Romano ★★½ 4

  I get it, it's realism, life for poor people was awful in post WWII in Italy. But I can't bring myself to feel anything for the main character, who is effectively a pimp who abuses his poor prostitute and leaves her in the hands of people who beat her up. And yet the focus is on the poor pimp, who we are meant to sympathise with. Yeah, I'm sure life was awful for poor men in post WWII Italy. But it was much much worse for poor women. Pasolini was too complex a person to be addressed in a short Letterboxd review, and I understand you can't read everything through a feminist reading, but I personally find it very hard not to. That being said, from an Italian perspective, it does feel very real and authentic. Unfortunately for Pasolini, sexism has always been intrinsic into Italian culture.

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  Review by Mario Melendez ★★½ 8

  I have a pending account with this film for almost three years, for various reasons. I confess that this is the first time I have seen it.

  As much as I have had the opportunity to visualize other films of this director before my eyes, Salo is always and will be the best work that Pasolini left us, although it sounds crazy to say so, his other films do not attract me to the degree that I feel in love with them as his last film did.

  In this one Franco Citti personifies a proto toxic person, men like him would be used in various films so we could say that he served as an inspiration in the years to…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★ 1

  Pier Paolo Pasolini's debut follows pimp Accattone and his entourage of criminals and wastrels through their episodic life of scams, dodgy deals and general hucksterism. There's a distinct lack of moral judgement attached to the central character, and his wise-talking ensemble crackles with the same camaraderie as Scorsese's Mean Streets. It's a provocative blend of the neo-realism that had made the Italian film industry's reputation and the baroque stylisation then coming into vogue through Federico Fellini's work. The cinematography by Tonino Delli Colli, who collaborated on twelve films with Pasolini, has a bleached-out beauty that's hard-edged in the shadows it casts but luminous in the intensity of its light. While the film misfires in a dream sequence in which Accattone imagines witnessing his own funeral, Accattone is a film living in the gutter but looking up at the stars.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 3

  Yet again, the subtitles fail me! This time, they were not a separate track, but part of the film, and all in white on black-and-white background. Why would anyone think this was a good idea? Don't they understand the whole point is that they should be read?

  Despite this, this was a compelling film. It felt a little loose in tone in a way that kept me from really getting into it, but it illustrated some basic ideas about poverty, work, and crime without being cloying, didactic, or preachy. Much of the film seemed to amble about the titular character's misadventures with a bunch of young, idle youths and his work as a pimp for the beautiful Maddalena (and later,…