The Irishman reviews round-up: what the critics are saying about Scorsese’s ‘masterpiece’
There’s been so much fuss about the extraordinary – and somewhat baffling – de-ageing in The Irishman, Martin Scorsese’s first film for Netflix, that it’s almost eclipsed the potential it had for being a very good film. Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci have teamed up with the Taxi Driver director for a crime epic based on Charles Brandt’s mafia memoir I Heard You Paint Houses.
De Niro plays Frank Sheeran, a mob hitman and Second World War veteran who, in his old age, reflects on a lifetime in the mafia, particularly his involvement in the disappearance of labour leader Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), who was his friend, and his time with the Bufalino crime family.
The film is long, at a whopping three-and-a-half hours, which is a big ask for those potentially watching it on their iPhones via Netflix. But it is also, the first critics to see it say, a triumph. After a screening in New York, the first verdicts are out – and they have amounted to an impressive 100 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes’ scale. Here’s why:
Benjamin Lee, The Guardian ★★★★☆
As one might expect from a director of such loving precision, The Irishman is exquisitely made, every detail carefully considered, every location perfectly picked and with such a gargantuan budget at hand, it feels utterly transporting, a film to be savoured on a big, crisp screen rather than half-watched on a smartphone. De-ageing quibbles aside, the craftsmanship contained here is flawless and my main reservation about its Netflix availability is that not enough people will get to appreciate the delicacy of Scorsese and his team’s work in theatres.
Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair
Scorsese, as ever, riskily courts sympathy for these thugs, and while there might be some notes of over-reverence in The Irishman, I think he mostly maintains the proper perspective. These are bad guys who’ve done bad things, but in the movie’s whispery allegory, all that misdeed is a harsh metaphor for the scrambling we do in our own lives. In The Irishman’s arresting final act, Scorsese captures the smallness and loneliness of life, its pathetic flattening out—time, in some senses but not all, eventually erodes away all of our context.
Eric Kohn, Indiewire
The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s best crime movie since Goodfellas, and a pure, unbridled illustration of what has made his filmmaking voice so distinctive for nearly 50 years. Forget that it’s a touch too long and the much-ballyhooed de-aging technology doesn’t always cast a perfect spell; the movie zips along at such a satisfying clip that its flaws rarely amount to more than mild speed bumps along the way.
David Edelstein, Vulture
For Scorsese, the slowing-down in The Irishman is radical, and it pays off in the long series of final scenes in which the characters are too old to move as they once did. They can’t hide inside motion, and so Scorsese doesn’t — and the upshot is one of his most satisfying films in decades.
Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
As Scorsese hopscotches across cities and decades, often in the service of a dizzyingly large number of plot turns, characters, and narrative cul de sacs, it’s hard not to wonder whether the movie – underwritten entirely by Netflix in the anything-goes age of streaming – would have made more sense as a limited series. There’s a sense too, that The Irishman is a kind of caps-lock Scorsese – the greatest hits of his career revisited once more, with feeling.
Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
The Irishman offers one breathlessly exciting sequence after another that immediately feel like part of the canon, from a barbershop slaying that Rodrigo Prieto’s camera glides past, showing us a florist’s window while we hear the mayhem offscreen, to a sequence in which Frank demonstrates how to choose the right gun for a public slaying and whether or not to go to the bathroom before committing the murder.
Matt Zoller Seitz, Roger Ebert
This is not necessarily a seamless movie. Admirable as it is to see Scorsese committing to self-contained scenes that often unfurl like deadpan comedy sketches, the many digressions, marvelous as they are, come at the expense of fleshing out the canvas. And even at three-and-a-half hours, certain aspects feel undernourished.
The Irishman is released in UK cinemas on November 8, and will stream on Netflix from November 24