no. 11, possibly

I'm not sure how GQ missed Luchino Visconti's mesmerizing and bleak masterpiece "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960) on their list of "The Ten Best Guy Films You've Never Seen". It's a solid list and if my masculinity were in question, I would say I fared pretty well having seen seven out of ten of the films. In terms of it not being mentioned in the same laudatory breath as Fellini's "La Dolce Vita", Rossellini's "Roma Open City", and Antonioni's "L'Aventurra", and its issues concerning masculinity and identity, "Rocco and His Brothers" is a fitting description for GQ, but it's also a somber, exacting piece of Italian cinema featuring memorable performances by star Alain Deloin, Annie Girardot, and Renato Salvatore. The film centers around a fatherless family of five brothers who have recently moved from the squalor of Southern Italy to the land of hope and promise of Milan, where they come of age in a time when their country is economically devastated and culturally depressed. Each brother becomes the focus of a segment that pieces together the narrative and we learn their journey for self-preservation leads to a devastating end that as is cathartic and pulverizing as any humanist dramas made popular by the neo-realist movement of the immediate post-war years. Each boy in their pursuit of happiness finds that life is hard and damning and rising above it all can feel insurmountable. This is particularly crushing because their lives are devoid of the fantasy of an idealistic and prosperous home life where their roles as men are clear and performed without familial strife on an everyday basis. At times melodramatic and other times so subtle and succinct, "Rocco and His Brothers" is a movie about what it means to be a man, but often times how that definition can be so brutally arbitrary.