Gangs of New York Review

Daniel Day-Lewis plays Bill the Butcher as a coiled showman, glass eye carved with an eagle, voice pitched somewhere between a carnival barker and a blade, and he takes the picture with him every time he enters a room. That is the problem as much as the pleasure. Amsterdam Vallon is written as a watcher, a young man biding his time inside the Butcher's court, and DiCaprio plays the waiting honestly, but the revenge plot he carries is thin rope stretched across 167 minutes.

What holds is the world. Dante Ferretti built Five Points on the Cinecitta backlot as a churned trench of mud, tallow light and painted signage, and Michael Ballhaus shoots it with enough weight that the 1863 draft riots register as a collapse rather than a set piece. Cameron Diaz is stranded as Jenny, handed a pickpocket's biography and no scene that tests it. The ending, with naval cannon fire tearing through the brawl and a dissolve forward to a modern skyline, reaches for a thesis about a country built out of this violence that the two hours before it have not quite earned.