Ostensibly "suggested" by Herbert Asbury's 1928 historical chronicle of New York's 19th century underworld, Martin Scorsese's American epic bore little relation to its source material by the time it unfurled in theaters as a remorseless holiday offering in 2002. A hulking, feral slab of gouging, stabbing, and cleaving, Gangs of New York emerged from the catacombs of development hell as a primordial work of historical fiction, with real-life personages Boss Tweed and Horace Greeley braided into the fictional story of Irish gang leader Amsterdam Vallon (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his nativist rival William Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis). Set primarily in 1863, in the lead-up to New York's Civil War draft riots and anti-Black pogroms, Gangs of New York plays like an ancient song from an illiterate bard, unmetered poetry pitched to sate the unsophisticated palates of the Know-Nothings in the back room of a bawdyhouse — or, as A.O. Scott summarized it, "historical filmmaking without the balm of right-thinking ideology." The recreation of New York's Five Points neighborhood remains staggering, a spectacle evocatively summoned by Salon's Stephanie Zacharek as "too big for any screen it could possibly be projected onto; it spills and sprawls off the margins, and you can imagine whole panoramic worlds outside the frame." (Text courtesy of Chicago Film Society)
 

35mm from the Chicago Film Society, permission Paramount Pictures
 

Preceded by: "The Big Shave" (Martin Scorsese, 1967) – 5 min – 16mm