The Gangs of New York, hmm?

What's wrong with it: editing's all over the place, the continuity's shite and the story gets chopped about. There's not much flow in it, you can't settled into the story. Maybe the director didn't want you to settle into the comfort zone - and indeed, it would be hard with the unblinking violence meted out - but what he's done is ensure you simply can't engage with the story in any sort of unselfconscious fashion. Constantly uncertain about what he's trying to achieve, and the story he's trying to tell, I ended up not getting that much out of it. There was too much distance between me and the characters.

What 's right with it: underneath it all, it is a good story. Has that Guy Gavriel Kay feeling about it - the melding of the overall picture and the individual details. The performances throughout were very good, though the overall clumsiness of the movie reduced their ability to communicate with the audience.

And then there's the telling factor that we were still thinking about it, still talking about it, many hours after we walked out. That's something not many movies manage in this age of creative deadening.