Bringing Out the Dead Reviews
Its hard-to-pin-down tone is frighteningly original -- simultaneously world-weary and adolescent with an aura of perpetual anxiety, as if the characters and filmmakers were in pursuit of a catharsis everyone knows will never come.
Of course, it's immaculately crafted and exhilaratingly paced, but in the end it's never as emotionally involving as it could and should be.
Scorsese doesn't trust the power of simplicity to rock us.
Globe and Mail
Top CriticThe auteur has definitely left his distinctive mark, but too seldom and too narrowly.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Scorsese has delivered a film that's both savage and sorrowing.
If you enjoy redemptions drenched in rhapsodic agony, religious mysticism and the bloody ick of emergency room chaos, that journey will be bliss for you.
Bringing Out the Dead is a screaming siren of a film!
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Despite the lack of energy and the lethargic pace, there's something darkly compelling about Bringing Out the Dead.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Bringing Out the Dead is stunning to look at; unfortunately, it's not terribly satisfying to watch.
An intense, volatile film full of sorrow and wild, mordant humor.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
This film dances on the edge of flat-lining just like the DOAs that are Frank's stock-in-trade.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/5
Bringing Out the Dead not only shows us how difficult it is to get there, it lets us bask, finally, in the achievement.
Its central story and character are so uninvolving that they're overshadowed by the visaul razzle-dazzle and fail to act as a cohesive for all Scorsese's cinematic tricks.
Although Scorsese and Schrader may not have pulled off alchemy by transforming an undistinguished piece of literature into a great film, Bringing Out the Dead is still the best adaptation imaginable of its source material.
Bringing Out the Dead is curiously and disappointingly lethargic.
Anyone with a taste for high-risk filmmaking won't want to miss it.
Scorsese is never on autopilot, never panders, never sells out, always goes for broke; to watch his films is to see a man risking his talent, not simply exercising it.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The mood is less angst-ridden than hypercaffeinated, as Scorsese keeps cranking the velocity-bloodbath in the reggae inferno, exploding skyline pietà, climactic white light of redemption.
This is a film of great beauty, which is found not in its face but in its heart.
Bringing Out the Dead is as technically brilliant as you would expect from a film directed by Martin Scorsese.
| Original Score: 3/4
The film's postcards from the edge will burn into your consciousness.
