Think of gangsters in the movies and you probably come up with images of the Mafia crime dynasty in the Godfather movies, of Al Pacino strutting in a flashy white suit in Scarface or of Scorsese’s brash mobsters in Goodfellas. There’s blood-soaked violence in these films, of course, but the brutality usually comes with a giddy rush of excitement and its perpetrators tend to give off a whiff of dangerous glamour.There is nothing remotely cool or charismatic, however, about the mobsters who feature in the stunning new Italian crime movie Gomorrah, which depicts the squalid workings of organised crime in the suburbs of Naples with matter-of-fact realism and none of the bravura flourishes you usually get in Hollywood’s films about the Mafia.Recently nominated as Italy’s entrant for Best Foreign Language Film at next year’s Oscars, Gomorrah is based on a bestselling book by Roberto Saviano, who has been living under police protection since the publication of his ‘non-fiction novel’. The title is a pun on the Biblical city of sin (twinned with Sodom) and on the name of the Camorra, the Neapolitan crime network, a century older than the Sicilian Mafia, which makes more money and kills more people than any other criminal organisation in the world.Written and directed by Matteo Garrone, the film shows how the Camorra, or ‘la Sistema’ (the System) exerts its terrifying hold on Naples and the surrounding region by weaving together five stories taken from Saviano’s book. The subjects of these strands aren’t the leading mafiosi but rather people caught up, for the most part, in the dealings of the lower reaches of the underworld in the neighbourhood known as Scampia.Don Ciro is a middle-aged, cautious accountant who scurries about the warren-like passages of the district’s huge 1960s housing blocks, known as ‘Vele’ or Sails because of their shape, in order to deliver funds to the families of jailed gang members.Totò is a 13-year-old boy who gets initiated into one of the clans and finds hi