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Reviews Counted:42
Fresh:39
Rotten:3
Average Rating:8/10
Consensus: The Departed is a thoroughly engrossing gangster drama with the gritty authenticity and soupy morality that has infused director Martin Scorceses past triumphs. Featuring outstanding work from an excellent cast that includes Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon, some critics say the film even tops its source material (the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs). The Departedmarks a triumphant return to form for Scorsese; it's his best-reviewed film since GoodFellas.
Theatrical Release:Oct 6, 2006 Wide
Box Office: $132,310,442
Synopsis: Director Martin Scorsese returns to his trademark style with the violent, bruised, and bloody feature THE DEPARTED. Scorsese filched the basic storyline from Wai Keung Lau and Siu Fai Mak's... [More]
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Vera Farmiga
Director: Martin Scorsese
What makes this a Scorsese film, and not merely a retread, is the director's use of actors, locations and energy, and its buried theme. I am fond of saying that a movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it.
Top CriticThe Departed has enough tension to keep you engrossed, and enough color for ten crime pictures. Scorsese obviously adores his expensive, expansive ensemble.
Top CriticIs Scorsese desperate? This screenplay has the scent of it, as if he is scraping for material to feed his basic filmic interests.
Top Critic[A] glorious mess of a movie.
Top CriticThe Departed is murderous fun, but it’s too shallow to be the kind of movie that haunts your sleep.
Top CriticScorsese has put together a fantastic ensemble of actors: Some of the movie's best performances are the ones tucked into the corners, like Alec Baldwin's beefy, arrogant state police honcho.
Top CriticThe storytelling here is a model of smooth precision.
Top CriticAs The Departed wears on, it becomes more exciting, more grimly funny and more nihilistic -- and that nihilism has a lasting impact.
Top CriticFreed from iconic figures and weighty themes, Martin Scorsese, in The Departed, gets to riff and rock. And the audience gets a huge, bloody, profane entertainment in the bargain.
Top CriticThe Departed remains a rousing film.
Top CriticAfter a pair of flawed Oscar-hunting epics, Martin Scorsese has returned to the gritty, violent mob drama that has always been his strong suit, and the result -- The Departed -- is his best film since 1990's Goodfellas.
Top CriticFor all its bloodletting, The Departed is an intoxicating film. It's a film that'll have your hands over your face with one eye peeking: The violence sickens, but the movie seduces.
Top CriticAs so often before, the body count is high in a Martin Scorsese movie. But where once the bodies pulsated with life in all its vainglorious furor, here they drop like wooden ducks in an artificial pond.
Top CriticIf this one doesn't win Scorsese an Oscar, then there's something seriously wrong with Oscar.
Top CriticIt's a thinking fan's thriller, a movie involving multiple fully dimensional characters, multiple story lines and edge-of-your-seat twists and swerves, stylized to just the edge of believability.
Top CriticSteeped in testosterone and laced with inventively used profanity, The Departed plunges us into a corrupt Boston world for parallel stories about two cops, played by Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Top CriticThe Departed exhibits a rough-hewn, deft intelligence. Monahan has written some razor-sharp lines, and Scorsese's latest crew knows how to wield the quips.
Top CriticRude, crafty, funny and richly profane, it's the work of an artist unmistakably in his element.
Top CriticIt is funny, shocking and brutal, and it's filled with brilliant performances, with some of our best actors sinking their teeth into a great screenplay from William Monahan.
Top CriticA relentlessly violent, breathtakingly assured piece of mean-streets filmmaking, the film shows the legendary director dropping the bids for industry respectability that have preoccupied him over the past decade and doing what he does best.
Top Critic
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