In a week that saw the Berlin Film Festival and then the Baftas make headlines with stories that evolved by the day if not the hour, probably few in the media had the time or the energy to dive into Marco Bellocchio’s six-part miniseries Portobello, which made its streaming debut last weekend. Such bad timing could have been fatal for a theatrical release, but thankfully Bellocchio’s terrific crime drama is still available worldwide as a HBO Original series available on HBO Max. It takes its time, features very specific — and very local — cultural references, but it pulls together for a breathtaking final episode that wraps up all the loose ends of what appears to be a highly complicated plot but actually isn’t. It’s all quite devastatingly simple.

There have always been miscarriages of justice, we know that. But then there’s what happened to TV presenter Enzo Tortora, a story so baroque and surreal it could only have happened in ’80s Italy. Like the poliziotteschi films of Fernando Di Leo (1932-2003), Portobello takes us to a country where the police, at best, are incompetent, and the criminal underworld has its tentacles in all walks of life. Which is why, when Tortora (Fabrizio Gifuni), a household name, is accused of dealing cocaine to his celebrity friends, he is arrested without question.

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