Notes

The Italian director, Marco Bellocchio has had a long, prolific, and very distinguished career. In the movie "The traitor" a crime/drama film, the portrait of Tommaso Buscetta, a soldier in Sicily’s Cosa Nostra in the 1980s, is one of his best films, it may well be his finest achievement in some years.
It begins in Palermo in the early ’80s, as two rival Mafia families get together to celebrate they're having apparently come to an agreement on how to divide up the increasingly profitable heroin trade. Soon after, Buscetta, tired of his life of crime, decides to move with his wife to Rio de Janeiro, leaving behind two sons by a previous marriage. When all hell breaks out between the two clans, among the many executed are his sons and his brother. Extradited to Italy, the judge Falcone eventually persuades Buscetta to tell the truth about who’s who in the local Cosa Nostra.
Bellocchio displays enormous skill in alternating courtroom drama expertly staged scenes of the wars waged by the Mafia rivals (a sequence involving a freeway explosion that destroys a car is one of the most genuinely shocking). The film is also blessed with a superlative lead performance by Pierfrancesco Favino, he and Bellocchio manage in the end to make us feel sympathy, even respect, for a protagonist initially presented as a monster.
Frankly speaking, in terms of genre, there may be nothing especially remarkable about Bellocchio’s film, but in most other regards it truly excels. A gem.