Average Rating: 5.5/10
Reviews Counted: 30
Fresh: 14 | Rotten: 16
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 2.9/10
Critic Reviews: 6
Fresh: 1 | Rotten: 5
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 3.1/5
User Ratings: 4,904
A notorious artistic and financial failure, Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate was blamed for critically wounding the movie Western and definitively ushering out the 1970s Hollywood New Wave of young, brash, independent filmmakers. Taking a revisionist, post-Vietnam view of American imperialism, Cimino used the historical Johnson County War incident in Wyoming to create an impressionistic tapestry of Western conflict between poor immigrant settlers and rich cattle barons led by Canton (Sam
Nov 19, 1980 Limited
May 15, 2001
MGM/UA
All Critics (30) | Top Critics (6) | Fresh (14) | Rotten (17) | DVD (6)
The longer version is impressive as long as the characters and settings remain in long shot; only when the camera gets closer do the problems start.
It really is a stinker.
The balance of director Michael Cimino's film is so confusing, so overlong at three-and-a-half hours and so ponderous that it fails to work at almost every level.
This movie is $36 million thrown to the winds. It is the most scandalous cinematic waste I have ever seen, and remember, I've seen Paint Your Wagon.
The lie of frontier idealism is debunked, and Vilmos Zsigmond's mistily gorgeous cinematography is virtually an act of mourning in and of itself.
Heaven's Gate' is something quite rare in movies these days -- an unqualified disaster.
Sometimes, both audiences and critics get it right the first time.
I like Heaven's Gate just fine, but I don't love it. I wish I did. It's fun to participate in the redemption of a film maudit.
With Criterion's Blu-ray release of Heaven's Gate, late New Hollywood's most famous hot mess gets a little bit hotter.
[VIDEO ESSAY] "Heaven's Gate" is an unforgettable film full of heartfelt sincerity and pointed commentary about America's bloody history of hypocrisy, greed, and racism.
Flawed but interesting piece of art in the form of an anti-Western.
Beneath the hype and the excess is a beautiful, moving, at times surprisingly subtle film that hovers precariously somewhere between greatness and folly.
This beautiful but notoriously disappointing film is one of the most overblown epic Westerns of any decade.
A second look at Cimino's 1981 epic Western suggests that it has major problems but is not a total catastrophe.
If you can get past its self-indulgences, somewhat ineffectual action scenes and other structural flaws in its filmmaking, it's really quite a remarkable film.
Maybe not the masterpiece Cimino intended, but in its 219-minute version Heaven's Gate is a very good Western, and not nearly the disaster some have unfairly labeled it.
For all the abuse heaped on it, this is -- in its complete version, at least -- a majestic and lovingly detailed Western which simultaneously celebrates and undermines the myth of the American frontier.
has considerable curiosity value... as an important piece of contemporary film history and as an example of how a filmmaker got it so wrong by trying so hard to get it right.
A great movie which did not deserve the lousy reputation heaped on it by vituperative critics.
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