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100Gangs of New York is something better than perfect: It's thrillingly alive.
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100A 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.
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91Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.
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90A grand achievement in history and anthropology, supporting its ambition and scope with a sumptuous re-creation of the period and an immediacy that allows a forgotten past to barrel into the present.
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90This is historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology, either liberal or conservative. Gangs of New York is nearly a great movie. I suspect that, over time, it will make up the distance.
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90It's a magnificent achievement—holes, tatters, crudities, screw-ups, and all.
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90This daring, perhaps confusing declaration of irrelevance suggests that the epic is a form a director like Scorsese must subvert even as he invokes it. But it doesn't erase the sordid splendor of Scorsese's congested, conflicted, entrancing achievement.
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90Bears all the earmarks of a magnum opus for Martin Scorsese: Fascinating and fresh material about his beloved New York City, an epic reach, an equally epic gestation period, a dynamic criminal element, combustible socio-political-religious elements, outstanding actors and sophisticated allusions to cinema history that inform and enrich the experience.
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90Scorsese creates a film so resonant that it is both a work of great art and an anthropological document.
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88Rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past.
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88If Martin Scorsese's staggeringly ambitious one-of-a-kind finally has too many flaws to be great, it has as much greatness in it as any movie this year.
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88Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and 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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88Each major character is complex, none more so than Bill. He's almost Shakespearean in scope.
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80This is a spacious, robust movie that grabs hold of us and doesn't let go for nearly three hours.
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80Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.
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78The best Scorsese we've seen in a decade.
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75The movie is strong in sound and fury, weak in nuance and insight.
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75The movie turns choppy in the final third, but it is a monumental achievement nonetheless.
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75Though never dull and often visually beautiful, this work of operatic sweep doesn't fulfill its own ambitions.
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75Lacks one thing -- an epic grandeur.
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75Doesn't come close to masterpiece status. There are some great individual scenes and a tremendous performance by Daniel Day-Lewis, but the connecting material is mediocre, leading to the occasional twinge of dissatisfaction.
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75There is greatness in Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York: titanic acting, violent poetry, moviemaking on a grand scale, a real air of daring. And there is flab in it as well, and confusion.
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75All of Scorsese's movies deliver a mixed message, but this one is downright schizophrenic.
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70Stunning, and it has the added bonus of being about an era that is virtually new to movies. As a dramatic achievement, however, it is not quite so amazing.
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63Gangs of New York is many things, but a masterpiece is not one of them. It is primarily, and somewhat surprisingly, a poky western, with a vengeful orphan.
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63While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.
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63Unfortunately, it lacks emotional lift or folkloric fervor.
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60"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.
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60Scorsese and his writers have saddled their dream with a corny plot apparently lifted from some old 1930s Warner Bros. film starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien.
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60Cost well over $100 million, and the money is up there for the gawking. Illuminated by the orange flames of hell, the vast New York City set looks great. The least engaging aspect of the movie is its script -- which passed through the hands of three separate writers and perhaps even producer Harvey Weinstein.
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60The problem here lies not in the abundance of blood--we've seen that before--but in the film's pounding insistence, which prevails for all two hours and 40 minutes, that we also absorb a rather thin and unreliable history lesson.
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60Gangs is a dream project Scorsese has wanted to make for 30 years. You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.
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60The movie is strange and muddled -- a disorganized epic -- but Day-Lewis, disporting himself with royal assurance, does what he can to hold it together. [23 & 30 December 2002, p. 166]
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60The flaw that separates Scorsese's film into its components is its lack of a crystallized theme.
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50An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real, Gangs of New York feels like a movie musical without the songs.
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50Epic, meticulously researched and ultimately disappointing, Martin Scorsese's bloody valentine to the birth of his beloved city is less than the sum of its parts.
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50Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.
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50Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.
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40Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 77 out of 117
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Mixed: 20 out of 117
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Negative: 20 out of 117
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KevinM3
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Joseph10
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ConorS.9