‘Adagio’ Review: A Great Cast Smoulders In Stefano Sollima’s Slow-Burn Rome-Set Gangster Drama – Venice Film Festival

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Despite its soft-sounding title, Stefano Sollima’s crime drama is a gripping call-back to the heyday of poliziotteschi movies, a peculiarly Italian genre that dealt with inter-gang wars in a country where the police were often more venal than the bad guys.

Adagio, though, takes a unique tack, borrowing from Martin Scorsese’s fatalistic masterpiece The Irishman to portray to tell a story in which a trio of gangsters — one blind, one suffering early-onset dementia, and another with terminal cancer — are forced to reunite against a team of bent cops involved in an elaborate blackmail plan.

There are shades of Elio Petri’s classic Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, too, although it takes a while for this to become obvious.

Indeed, for some 45 minutes, Sollima keeps us guessing as to which side the villains are actually on, starting with a long sequence in which a young man named Manuel (Gianmarco Franchini) goes undercover at a decadent party called The Last Night of the World, where drag queens dance with rent boys and cocaine is freely available.