Gangs of New York

Rolling Stone Peter Travers

Gangs of New York is something better than perfect: It's thrillingly alive.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

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.

Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum

Everything is vast and hugely ambitious in Martin Scorsese's magisterial, scrambled historical epic.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Scott Tobias

A 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.

Time Richard Corliss

This 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.

Variety Todd McCarthy

Bears 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.

Washington Post Michael O'Sullivan

Scorsese creates a film so resonant that it is both a work of great art and an anthropological document.

The New York Times A.O. Scott

This 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.

Slate David Edelstein

It's a magnificent achievement—holes, tatters, crudities, screw-ups, and all.

Boston Globe Ty Burr

Scorsese 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.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

Each major character is complex, none more so than Bill. He's almost Shakespearean in scope.

USA Today Mike Clark

If 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.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Rips up the postcards of American history and reassembles them into a violent, blood-soaked story of our bare-knuckled past.

Film Threat Rich Cline

This is a spacious, robust movie that grabs hold of us and doesn't let go for nearly three hours.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Throbs with an ambition that sends it soaring, then brings it down.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

The best Scorsese we've seen in a decade.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Though never dull and often visually beautiful, this work of operatic sweep doesn't fulfill its own ambitions.

New York Daily News Jami Bernard

The movie turns choppy in the final third, but it is a monumental achievement nonetheless.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

Lacks one thing -- an epic grandeur.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

There 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.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Doesn'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.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

The movie is strong in sound and fury, weak in nuance and insight.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

All of Scorsese's movies deliver a mixed message, but this one is downright schizophrenic.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

Stunning, 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.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Rick Groen

While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

Unfortunately, it lacks emotional lift or folkloric fervor.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

Gangs 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.

Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek

"Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Cost 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.

LA Weekly John Powers

Scorsese 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.

The New Yorker David Denby

The 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]

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

The flaw that separates Scorsese's film into its components is its lack of a crystallized theme.

Dallas Observer Bill Gallo

The 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.

Newsweek David Ansen

Gangs 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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

Epic, 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.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

Under its scope and reach and passion, Gangs of New York is pretty ordinary stuff.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

An 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.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

Starts off with a lot of promise and excitement but winds up 165 minutes later feeling empty and affectless.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

Scorsese 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.