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Gangs of New York
"America Was Born In The Streets."
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Movie Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes®
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.
Full Review|Jan 16, 2003
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|Dec 24, 2002As it is, the film is always watchable, occasionally riveting, but ultimately a disappointment.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002All 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|Dec 20, 2002fatally 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.
Dec 20, 2002A sprawling, rhythmless, exploitatively violent folly, studded with shallow characters.
Dec 19, 2002A misfire of monstrous proportions, the worst large-scale epic since Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate.
Full Review|Dec 19, 2002Whether or not a longer version would have given the film more texture and dimension, this one presents a blinkered vision of American history.
Dec 5, 2002The impact is all in the broad strokes of Scorsese's design: the corresponding coming-of-age stories of three confused and violent adolescents: Amsterdam Vallon, New York City, and America. [Blu-Ray]
Full Review|Jun 30, 2008It's a story of violence, revenge, racial intolerance and class struggle, and it's a story told extremely well.
Full Review|Nov 29, 2006Day-Lewis's sneering, roaring, monstrous performance as the Butcher will remind you of the seemingly superhuman work Robert DeNiro performed in his prime.
Dec 6, 2004Gangs is Scorsese's impassioned, elegiac portrait of a time when blows were delivered with fists, bats, and blades rather than airplanes, anthrax, or keyboard strokes; it's his look back at a lost world, his urban western.
Full Review|May 19, 2004Martin Scorsese has landed back onto UK cinema screens with a resoundingly hollow thump.
Full Review|Nov 6, 2003What 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.
Full Review|Jan 16, 2003A triumph of pure craft and passionate heart.
Jan 9, 2003Gangs can be riveting, but for all its violence, it fails to land a knockout blow.
Dec 23, 2002It'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.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002I 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|Dec 20, 2002Gangs, for all its bloodletting, is the aberrant case of a movie that needed more violence to make its moral point.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002The spasmodic spectacle fails to develop any narrative or visceral momentum -- it has no cumulative effect.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002Like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002This 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|Dec 19, 2002The story's scope and pageantry are mesmerizing, and Mr. Day-Lewis roars with leonine power.
Full Review|Dec 19, 2002Missteps aside, this is moviemaking of real ambition.
Dec 19, 2002The brilliant Martin Scorsese has created a phenomenal work that plunges us deep into Lower Manhattan in the 1860s.
Full Review|Dec 16, 2002The whole may not add up to the sum of its parts, but it's difficult to dismiss the brilliance of those parts.
Full Review|Feb 18, 2009Why did Scorsese spend three decades thirsting to make this movie? It's nowhere clear on the screen.
Full Review|Feb 13, 2008Martin Scorseses dream project finally explodes on the screen after years of planning and another year of delays.
Full Review|May 26, 2006It is unrelentingly gritty and tense.
Oct 14, 2004It will be a film that, in decades hence, will only grow in stature and importance.
Full Review|Mar 16, 2004Martin Scorcese delivers an enormous blowout of a film, a biopic of New York in the 1800s... but it's too much bombast and far too loose.
Full Review|Oct 7, 2003You have to honor its mad ambition. But sadly, it feels like a dream too long deferred.
Jan 14, 2003It's a magnificent achievement -- holes, tatters, crudities, screw-ups, and all.
Full Review|Dec 27, 2002For almost the first two-thirds of Martin Scorsese's 168-minute Gangs of New York, I was entranced.
Full Review|Dec 23, 2002For 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.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002The world needs more filmmakers with passionate enthusiasms like Martin Scorsese. But it doesn't need Gangs of New York.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002It 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.
Dec 20, 2002Day-Lewis keeps you awake whenever the story loses steam during the film's 2 hours and 48 minutes.
Full Review|Dec 20, 2002The 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.
Full Review|Dec 19, 2002An elaborately worked-over opus that's as tarted-up and artificial as Scorsese's '70s classic Mean Streets was gritty and real.
Dec 19, 2002Not 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.
Dec 19, 2002A 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|Dec 19, 2002A richly impressive and densely realized work that bracingly opens the eye and mind to untaught aspects of American history.
Full Review|Dec 6, 2002One of Scorsese's weakest films, a wannabe historical epic that's essentially a formulaic revenge saga; the only reason to see it is Daniel Day-Lewis' compelling performance as Bill the Butcher.
Full Review|Nov 23, 2010It's a story of such relevance to New York, to America and even to the rest of the world, that just had to be told on film with as much impact as a filmmaker can muster. And Martin Scorsese musters much.
Full Review|Oct 18, 2008It's never less than compelling, driven by an overwhelming, larger than life performance from Day-Lewis and by Scorsese's grandiose historical imagination.
Full Review|Feb 9, 2006Daniel Day-Lewis' magnetic portrayal of a 19th-century ganglord who butchered his enemies as readily as he carved up a freshly killed hog.
Full Review|Jun 23, 2004Gangs' editing, suspense, and overall visual style all are evocative of classic Scorsese greats, but rarely has the filmmaker's thematic eye been so carefully trained.
Jun 26, 2003
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