Heaven's Gate

This movie is a study in wretched excess. It is so smoky, so dusty, so foggy, so unfocused and so brownish yellow that you want to try Windex on the screen. A director is in deep trouble when we do not even enjoy the primary act of looking at his picture. Read full review

In depicting the Johnson County War of 1892 (immigrants versus cattle barons), Michael Cimino delivers soaring ambition and scale, but always syringed with a deep sense of regret. Read full review

To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity. Read full review

This beautiful but notoriously disappointing film is one of the most overblown epic Westerns of any decade. Read full review

Well, it really is a stinker, a compendium of The Deer Hunter's weaknesses (of plotting, narration, dialogue, and character) with few of its lyrical strengths. Read full review

A grippingly violent parable, a touching, tragic romance and – thanks to legendary cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and an unprecedented attention to historical detail – quite simply one of the most beautiful, immersive films ever made. Read full review

The first scenes of Heaven’s Gate are so energetic and beautiful that anyone who knows the saga of the $35 million epic might begin to think it was going to be worth every penny. Unfortunately 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. Read full review

It's a film of rare beauty and scope, a feast for the eyes and a harrowing, unflinching meditation on the cruelty of capitalism. It rivals William Friedkin's Sorceror in its bone-deep cynicism and eviscerating take on the free market's coal-black heart of darkness. Read full review

Cimino fashioned a deep, multi-textured screenplay rich with fully dimensional characters. His ensemble cast brought the story to vivid life. Kristofferson gave a career peak performance here as a man who seems perpetually out of his element. Read full review

Nothing in the movie works properly. For all of the time and money that went into it, it's jerry-built, a ship that slides straight to the bottom at its christening. Heaven's Gate is something quite rare in movies these days - an unqualified disaster. Read full review

A grandiose Western based on the Johnson County War of 1892, when cattle barons brought in mercenaries to massacre immigrant settlers, it suffers badly from narrative incoherence. But there’s a grand romantic sweep to the action (enacted by a solid cast including Kris Kristofferson, Christopher Walken and Isabelle Huppert), the set-pieces are majestic and its disenchanted view of the American frontier myth still rings ominously true. Read full review

The story is both slow moving and hard to follow, but the locations and period details offer plenty to ponder. Read full review

The relationships between the characters are designed to climax in the slaughter, but by then the static images, the lack of rhythm and the paucity of intelligence (Heaven's Gate is simultaneously without subtlety or clarity) have taken their toll and the movie is unsalvageable. [21 Nov 1980]

An epic vision isn't worth much if you can't tell a story. This, in a nutshell, is the problem at the heart of the three-hour-and-39-minute debacle called Heaven's Gate. In his painstaking quest for period authenticity and his reliance on the operatic set piece, Cimino has lost all sight of day-to-day reality--and all sense of dramatic truth. [01 Dec 1980, p.88]

It is a demanding film, without a doubt – but a passionate one. Read full review