Gangs of New York (2002) Critic Reviews

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

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

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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

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

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review