Gangs of New York Reviews
Time Out
Top CriticIt's never less than compelling, driven by an overwhelming, larger than life performance from Day-Lewis and by Scorsese's grandiose historical imagination.
The result reverberates on the screen with a deadly force and fury more intense than anything Mr. Scorsese has yet achieved on the meanest and most beloved streets he could imagine or recall.
What we're left with has the patness of a history lesson about our roots and the melting pot and what it means to be an American.
You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.
Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.
A triumph of pure craft and passionate heart.
| Original Score: 4/4
It's a magnificent achievement -- holes, tatters, crudities, screw-ups, and all.
Despite some reservations, however, the movie never lost my interest, and I consider it to be worth a trip to a theater to see.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Gangs can be riveting, but for all its violence, it fails to land a knockout blow.
| Original Score: B
For almost the first two-thirds of Martin Scorsese's 168-minute Gangs of New York, I was entranced.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Darkly operatic and brilliantly realized.
It's as if [Scorsese] preferred to concentrate on the production ... rather than on the dramatic issues and, oh yeah, taking up the rear, the human beings who live them.
For all its lack of breathing room ... it realistically puts you into the Civil War North as much as Gone With the Wind does with the romantically idealized South.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Bill the Butcher is a coiled monster with a guttural voice and a sharply thrown knife; Day-Lewis brings him to glittery, intense life.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
I doubt I'll ever be able to look at a smirking fellow in old daguerreotype, with rolled-up sleeves and a mustache, and not think of Daniel Day-Lewis and all that vitality lost to time.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
The world needs more filmmakers with passionate enthusiasms like Martin Scorsese. But it doesn't need Gangs of New York.
Gangs, for all its bloodletting, is the aberrant case of a movie that needed more violence to make its moral point.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
It vividly and energetically evokes a fascinating time and place that has never before been the subject of film, and presents a powerful if imperfectly coherent vision of urban politics at their most primal.
| Original Score: 3/4
As it is, the film is always watchable, occasionally riveting, but ultimately a disappointment.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
The spasmodic spectacle fails to develop any narrative or visceral momentum -- it has no cumulative effect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A muddle splashed with bloody beauty as vivid as any Scorsese has ever given us.
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| Original Score: A-
A historical epic with the courage of its convictions about both scope and detail.
| Original Score: 3/4
Day-Lewis keeps you awake whenever the story loses steam during the film's 2 hours and 48 minutes.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
All of this is a triumph for Scorsese, and yet I do not think this film is in the first rank of his masterpieces. It is very good but not great.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A fever-sprawl of a movie, a melting-pot panorama, brought to full boil.
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| Original Score: A-
fatally overlong, filled with haphazard history lessons and half-drawn conclusions, never jelling into a cohesive film or possessing the energy to move its great bulk forward.
This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Mr. Scorsese's bravery and integrity in advancing this vision can hardly be underestimated.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The streets, shot by cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, may be as authentic as they are mean, but it is nearly impossible to care about what happens on them.
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| Original Score: 2/5
Day-Lewis' larger-than-life Bill is one of the great characters of movies.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The story's scope and pageantry are mesmerizing, and Mr. Day-Lewis roars with leonine power.
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| Original Score: A-
An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real.
| Original Score: 2/4
A sprawling, rhythmless, exploitatively violent folly, studded with shallow characters.
| Original Score: 2/5
Missteps aside, this is moviemaking of real ambition.
| Original Score: 3/5
Not bad enough to dismiss but too dense and boring to praise, let's just call Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York the year's longest and most expensive cinematic disappointment.
| Original Score: 2/4
At its best, the movie gives you a taste of the epic Scorsese intended, an epic that, sadly, will forever remain in the filmmaker's imagination.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
A misfire of monstrous proportions, the worst large-scale epic since Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Scorsese is at the peak of his powers.
A magnificent throwback to an almost vanished era of epic filmmaking by great filmmakers in thrall to their own passions, rather than to the studio bookkeepers.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
A lavish folly that suffers from an odd downscale effect.
The brilliant Martin Scorsese has created a phenomenal work that plunges us deep into Lower Manhattan in the 1860s.
A richly impressive and densely realized work that bracingly opens the eye and mind to untaught aspects of American history.
Whether or not a longer version would have given the film more texture and dimension, this one presents a blinkered vision of American history.
