The Departed Reviews
Top Critic[A] very entertaining, densely layered, just-short-of-fabulous melodrama.
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
You'll have to go back to GoodFellas to find a Marty movie this fun, this enamored of language, of ethnic slurs, of "Gimme Shelter," of explosive violence. Scorsese's return to form is the year's most dynamic film. Really, how could it not be?
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/6
The Departed has enough tension to keep you engrossed, and enough color for ten crime pictures. Scorsese obviously adores his expensive, expansive ensemble.
Is Scorsese desperate? This screenplay has the scent of it, as if he is scraping for material to feed his basic filmic interests.
The Departed is murderous fun, but it's too shallow to be the kind of movie that haunts your sleep.
Scorsese 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.
The storytelling here is a model of smooth precision.
That Scorsese can hit this kind of material out of the park isn't surprising, and much of The Departed gleams with a certain well-honed perfection.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
As The Departed wears on, it becomes more exciting, more grimly funny and more nihilistic -- and that nihilism has a lasting impact.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Freed 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.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The Departed is Scorsese's most entertaining picture in years, dense, violent (more of his screen sadism played for laughs), and satisfying.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
After 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A great, resonant, psychologically complex popcorn movie made by a cast and crew of filmmakers at the top of their game. Welcome back, Marty.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
For 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
As 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.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
If this one doesn't win Scorsese an Oscar, then there's something seriously wrong with Oscar.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
It'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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Steeped 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.
| Original Score: B
The 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Rude, crafty, funny and richly profane, it's the work of an artist unmistakably in his element.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
It 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A 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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Two and a half hours race by as this twisting, turning tale blazes its exciting, funny, brutal path.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
A crime drama of thrilling breadth and intensity.
It took a while, but Martin Scorsese has returned to the Mean Streets.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
It's a stylish head rush of a movie that flies by, even at two-and-a-half hours, and keeps turning the knife (and your stomach) up to the final scene.
Martin Scorsese's cubistic entertainment about men divided by power, loyalty and their own selves finds the director back on the mean streets where he belongs.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
Too operatic at times, too in love with violence and macho posturing at others, it's a potboiler dressed up in upscale designer clothes, but oh how that pot does boil.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
If the story suffers initially from a slight lack of focus, hang in there, because you will soon become immersed in a mesmerizing, expertly plotted cat-and-mouse game.
| Original Score: 4/4
With its welter of double crosses, The Departed is completely engrossing, a master class in suspense.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The Departed, which screenwriter William Monahan cleverly adapted from the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, crackles right along, stopping only long enough for Scorsese's signature bursts of explosive violence.
Scorsese's sharpest film in a decade and the most entertaining major studio release this year.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
After the dolled-up theatrics of his last few features, from Casino (1995) up through The Aviator (2004), it's a kick to find director Martin Scorsese back in prime form, at least in the terrific first half of The Departed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Comparisons to Goodfellas and Casino notwithstanding, it has a verve and texture all its own. It also has, courtesy of William Monahan, some of the best dialogue that Scorsese has ever worked with.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
In Martin Scorsese's thrilling, throbbing reinterpretation of [Infernal Affairs], it is the war that rages within all of us -- between our better and our badder selves -- that transforms this tale of treachery into one of the year's best movies.
| Original Score: 4/4
The Departed, which situates the Lau-Mak storyline in contemporary Boston, matches expectations for roughly two-thirds of its somewhat distended 2 1/2-hour running time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Dazzlingly done, with a welcome gloss of comic panache, it's the sort of thing Scorsese does better than any other major director in Hollywood.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
few directors can compose a movie with the power, grace and assurance that Scorsese brings to each shot and scene, and The Departed is more fun, and certainly more funny, than his last few films.
The argot of New York's Little Italy is Martin Scorsese's first language, but the filmmaker speaks fluent, pungent Bostonese in the terrific cops-and-mobsters tale The Departed.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Neither a debacle nor a bore, The Departed works but only up to a point, and never emotionally.
The veteran director has made two-thirds of a great film about Boston cops and mobsters, with dazzlingly rich performances from a dizzyingly stellar cast and an ambience that screams Scorsese's typical cultural authenticity.
The Departed is Scorsese's most purely enjoyable movie in years.
The original film was gritty and entertaining; the new version is a masterpiece -- the best effort Scorsese has brought to the screen since Goodfellas.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
This reworking of a popular Hong Kong picture pulses with energy, tangy dialogue and crackling performances from a fine cast.
Scorsese's relaxed energy infuses the film with excitement in every frame, thus elevating a gangster story to the level of tragedy.
A new American crime classic from the legendary Martin Scorsese, whose talent shines here on its highest beams.
| Original Score: 4/4
Mr. Scorsese and his associates have assembled a remarkably charismatic cast to impart coherence and conviction to a narrative that could have easily dwindled into an affectless succession of gratuitous intrigues.
