84%
59%
95%
Average Rating: 7.1/10
Reviews Counted: 201
Fresh: 150 | Rotten: 51
Though flawed, the sprawling, messy Gangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance.
Average Rating: 6.5/10
Critic Reviews: 42
Fresh: 28 | Rotten: 14
Though flawed, the sprawling, messy Gangs of New York is redeemed by impressive production design and Day-Lewis's electrifying performance.
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Average Rating: 3.5/5
User Ratings: 254,277
The violent rise of gangland power in New York City at a time of massive political corruption and the city's evolution into a cultural melting pot set the stage for this lavish historical epic, which director Martin Scorsese finally brought to the screen almost 30 years after he first began to plan the project. In 1846, as waves of Irish immigrants poured into the New York neighborhood of Five Points, a number of citizens of British and Dutch heritage who were born in the United States began
Dec 20, 2002 Wide
Jul 1, 2003
$77.6M
Miramax Films
All Critics (201) | Top Critics (42) | Fresh (159) | Rotten (51) | DVD (46)
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.
It's a magnificent achievement -- holes, tatters, crudities, screw-ups, and all.
Brilliant but devastating. High schoolers and up.
One 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.
[A] flawed masterpiece.
The whole may not add up to the sum of its parts, but it's difficult to dismiss the brilliance of those parts.
It'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.
It's not a perfect film, by any stretch of the imagination, and when there are cinematic sins they're sins of excess. But Gangs of New York entertains.
The 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]
Why did Scorsese spend three decades thirsting to make this movie? It's nowhere clear on the screen.
Gangs becomes a standard revenge opus. And a long one at that.
It's a story of violence, revenge, racial intolerance and class struggle, and it's a story told extremely well.
Martin Scorseses dream project finally explodes on the screen after years of planning and another year of delays.
It's never less than compelling, driven by an overwhelming, larger than life performance from Day-Lewis and by Scorsese's grandiose historical imagination.
Day-Lewis's sneering, roaring, monstrous performance as the Butcher will remind you of the seemingly superhuman work Robert DeNiro performed in his prime.
It is unrelentingly gritty and tense.
Daniel Day-Lewis' magnetic portrayal of a 19th-century ganglord who butchered his enemies as readily as he carved up a freshly killed hog.
Gangs 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.
It will be a film that, in decades hence, will only grow in stature and importance.
A great depiction of 1800's New York. Daniel Day Lewis is perfect.
October 28, 2011Super Reviewer
First I saw the first half. And I was a little dissapointed. There was good directing. And good acting. And you could feel the quality of the movie. But somehow it didn't get the job done. It didn't speak to me. Then I watched the second half a couple of days later. And that part was definitely better. It had the
May 7, 2011
Super Reviewer
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