Film of the year

Rating: 10/10 (23 December 2002)

For all the quibbling about this film's verisimilitude, "Gangs" is by far the best film of the year, and deserves the Oscar. Granted, Harvery Scissorhands obviously hacked out a lot of the supporting characters and some background material that would have helped flesh out the story, but the one that remains is as thrilling, funny, bloody and historically revealing as you could ever want from a epic. It's one of Scorsese's least character-driven films (in the sense that it is much less concerned with the characters than with the events that surround them) but he has still come up with a witches brew worthy of repeated viewings. And those who are upset about its cartoonishness and occsaional lack of realism, read five pages out of its source material and the movie comes off as a model of historical accuracy. Fascinating stuff.