Martin Scorsese: Ranking His Movies From Worst To Best

13. Gangs Of New York

Many great directors have pet projects which languish in development hell - sometimes they never get made, as with Stanley Kubrick's planned Napoleon, and sometimes they get past pre-production only to go off the rails, as Terry Gilliam experienced with his ill-fated adaptation of Don Quixote. Martin Scorsese is one of the lucky ones - after a 20 year wait he finally managed to secure the right amount of funding to direct Gangs of New York, the epic film about the various underworld factions in the Big Apple and the emergence of modern democratic institutions (themselves often as corrupt and violence-prone as their criminal counterparts). While Gangs of New York is frequently entertaining to watch, it falls victim to its own grand ambitions, sprawling a little too much for its own good. Fortunately, a solid performance from Daniel Day Lewis and exceptional production design by Dante Ferretti more than compensate for these shortcomings.