Everything in this film is composed and performed with such fluency, richness and attack; scene follows scene in a compulsive, addictive way.

[Rocco] is a work which shows Visconti addicted both to romantic melodrama and to contemporary social drama. It is through his own prodigious conviction and authority that these elements can be reconciled without arousing a fatal mistrust.

"Rocco and His Brothers" is a film both authentic and ambitious, a classic that is as adept at telling individual stories as it is in drawing larger parallels from them.

Most of Rocco and His Brother does, in fact, paint an accurate picture of 1960s Italy. A lot of the movie focuses on the discrimination that people from the South faced when moving to the north of Italy.