Art film
Museum of Modern Art film curator Charles Silver ranked "The Docks of New York" as “probably the last genuinely great silent film made in Hollywood [rivaling] Chaplin’s masterpieces of the 1930s.” With respect to Sternberg's oeuvre, "The Docks of New York" was “the first in which his prodigious pictorial genius was fully realized.” A “deceptively simple” and ‘emotionally affecting film”, Sternberg combined spectacle and emotion, where "his characters gain in clarity what they lose in complexity."