Gangs of New York

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

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. more

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

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. more

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. more

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

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. more

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. more

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

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

One of the big controversies surrounding this film was that Martin Scorcese was forced to cut nearly an hour of footage from his final vision in order to get the studio to release it. That's understandable, as not many people will be willing to sit through a 4 hour movie in theatres. So with the release of it on DVD, we should get the complete version, right? Well... it doesn't seem so. The details on this DVD mention nothing about extra footage. Isn't one of the benefits of the DVD format that we get to see what the director intended before politics and marketing step in? I for one would... more

Amazon Verified Purchase ( What's this? ) Every issue with the original Blu-ray release of this movie has been fixed, moving it from one of the worst releases on the format to one of the very best. This film now looks and sounds spectacular on Blu-ray and is a must own for any fan. more

There's been a lot of flack directed at Gangs of New York for it's supposed "Historical Inaccuracies". I can't add anything except this: If you go to the movies for your History Lessons, something's wrong with you. If you go to be entertained, Gangs of New York is just the ticket. Based on Herbert Asbury's turn-of-the-century book, Gangs tells the epic tale of the Five-Points section of Manhattan, and the colorful gangs (The Dead Rabbits, The Plug Uglies, The Swamp Angels, The Nativists, etc.) that ruled her mean streets. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Amsterdam Vallon, who witnessed his father... more