Product Description

This motion picture event from acclaimed director Martin Scorsese earned 10 Academy Award(R) nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, along with 5 Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Song! Leonardo DiCaprio (TITANIC), Cameron Diaz (CHARLIE'S ANGELS), and Daniel Day-Lewis (THE BOXER) star in this epic tale of vengeance and survival! As waves of immigrants swell the population of New York, lawlessness and corruption thrive in lower Manhattan's Five Points section. After years of incarceration, young Irish immigrant Amsterdam Vallon (DiCaprio) returns seeking revenge against the rival gang leader (Day-Lewis) who killed his father. But Amsterdam's personal vendetta becomes part of the gang warfare that erupts as he and his fellow Irishmen fight to carve a place for themselves in their newly adopted homeland!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2873 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-07-01
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 2
• Running time: 167 minutes

Amazon.com
Gangs of New York may achieve greatness with the passage of time. Mixed reviews were inevitable for a production this grand (and this troubled behind the scenes), but it's as distinguished as any of director Martin Scorsese's more celebrated New York stories. From its astonishing 1846 prologue to the city's infernal draft riots of 1863, the film aspires to erase the decorum of textbooks and chronicle 19th-century New York as a cauldron of street warfare. The hostility is embodied in a tale of primal vengeance between Irish American son Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his father's ruthless killer and "Nativist" gang leader Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, brutally inspired), so named for his lethal talent with knives. Vallon's vengeance is only marginally compelling; DiCaprio is arguably miscast, and Cameron Diaz (as Vallon's pickpocket lover) is adrift in a film with little use for women. Despite these weaknesses, Scorsese's mastery blossoms in his expert melding of personal and political trajectories; this is American history written in blood, unflinching, authentic, and utterly spectacular. --Jeff Shannon

DVD features
The plethora of extras on this two-disc set are worth your time. There are several well-produced segments on the physical aspects of the film highlighted by a tour of the vast Cinecittà Studio sets with director Martin Scorsese and production designer Dante Ferretti (with a 360-degree-view feature to boot). Historian Luc Sante introduces you to the Five Corners area in New York circa the mid-19th century, and there's a vintage vocabulary guide (from the 1859 edition of The Rogue's Lexicon). Even though it was made as a "puff piece" for the movie, the Discovery Channel show "Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York" is an informative half-hour on the film's historical background. There's another espresso double-shot from a Scorsese commentary track. Not recorded traditionally as he watches the movie, the track pieces together thoughts from the director including some recorded in an NPR interview. This allows Scorsese to be even more focused, dealing with the history of the time and his own 30-year struggle to make the film. One serious demerit for stretching the feature film over both discs, which most likely had to be done with having both Dolby 5.1 and DTS tracks along with the commentary on the long film. --Doug Thomas

From The New Yorker
Daniel Day-Lewis, returning to movies after a spell of shoemaking in Florence, disports himself with royal assurance as the voluble thug William Cutting (Bill the Butcher) in Martin Scorsese's generally unsuccessful epic about nineteenth-century gang life in New York. Wielding knife and cleaver, this vengeful brawler makes spectacles of blood that he knows are gratifying to others. He's a self-amused monster, and Day-Lewis does what he can to give this semi-coherent production some theatrical panache. Scorsese and his screenwriters (Jay Cocks, Steven Zaillian, and Kenneth Lonergan) never succeed in linking together the intimate personal dramas and the endless gang war between the nativist Yankees (i.e., Protestants) and the new waves of Irish immigrants. The movie isn't boring, but it's heavy-spirited, obvious, and grisly, with an emphasis on knives and blood that borders on the fetishistic. Scorsese shot "Gangs" in Rome's Cinecittˆ, and the picture has some of the depressive feverishness of "Fellini Satyricon," which was also shot there-the jeering spectators mounted in multitiered sets, the furtive life of the crime-ridden metropolis, with its hapless poverty, its barbaric entertainments, its obscure and unredeemed suffering. The movie also stars a sullen, stolid Leonardo DiCaprio as a young Irish immigrant eager to avenge the death of his father, Cameron Diaz as a prostitute and pickpocket, Liam Neeson as a fallen Irish leader, and Jim Broadbent as the corrupt political boss William Tweed. -David Denby
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Movie: 3.75/5 Picture Quality: 1/5 Sound Quality: 4/5 Extras: 2.75/5
Version: U.S.A / Region Free
VC-1 BD-50
Running time: 2:46:35
Movie size: 41,75 GB
Disc size: 48,30 GB
Average video bit rate: 22.67 Mbps

LPCM Audio English 6912 kbps 5.1 / 48kHz / 24-bit
Dolby Digital Audio English 640 kbps 5.1 / 48kHz
Dolby Digital Audio French 640 kbps 5.1 / 48kHz
Dolby Digital Audio English 192 kbps 2.0 / 48kHz

Subtitles: English SDH / French / Swedish / Norwegian / Danish / Finnish / Icelandic

#Audio Commentary
#History of the Five Points (SD, 14 min.)
#Set Design (SD, 9 min.)
#Exploring the Sets of Gangs of New York (SD, 23 min.)
#Costume Design (SD, 8 min.)
#Discovery Channel Special: Uncovering the Real Gangs of New York (SD, 35 min.)
#U2 Music Video: The Hands That Built America (SD, 5 min.)
#Trailers (SD, 5 min.)

An awful transfer of a great movie
The movie is a great, but we're talking about the Blu-Ray version of it. This is the worst Blu-Ray transfer I have yet seen. I already had the original DVD version, and expected a 1080p top quality transfer for the Blu-Ray, which this is not. I went back and watched some of the DVD version on an upscaling player, and it was indistinguishable from the Blu-Ray; both were well below the usual quality of a Blu-Ray. This may sadly indicate a growing trend, where an existing DVD transfer is run through an upscaler and put out on Blu-Ray, with the lie that it is a 1080p transfer. Judging from the many favorable reviews on this forum, many buyers' eyes or video system cannot tell the difference. I guess that is what the scoundrels who put out this Blu-Ray were banking on. I've just learned to be more careful about buying a Blu-Ray of something I already have on DVD.

Absolutely awful, but totally riveting, nonetheless!
This film/movie is absolutely awful, dreadfully violent, pretty disgusting, and likely to be nightmare-inducing, but it is totally riveting, nonetheless - I give it five stars, but I don't recommend watching it and won't do so myself again!