Rotten Tomatoes: 100% (8.97 in average rating) with 41 reviews

Critics consensus: An epic gangster drama that earns its extended runtime, The Irishman finds Martin Scorsese revisiting familiar themes to poignant, funny, and profound effect.

Metacritic: 92/100 (23 critics) "must-see"

As with other movies, the scores are set to change as time passes. Meanwhile, I'll post some short reviews on the movie.

De Niroโ€™s always at his best in the context of a Scorsese-mandated tough-guy routine, and Frank Sheeran gives the actor his most satisfying lead role in years. Sheeran appears in virtually every scene, and the story belongs to his colorful worldview the entire time. He may be an aging man telling tall tales, but that puts him in the same category as the one behind the camera. Sheeran, however, lost touch with his world long before he left it. With โ€œThe Irishman,โ€ Scorsese proves heโ€™s more alive than ever.

-Eric Kohn, IndieWire: A

Despite the movie's many pleasures and Scorsese's redoubtable directorial finesse, the excessive length ultimately is a weakness. Attempts to build in social context during the Kennedy and Nixon years, at times intercutting news footage from the period, aren't substantial enough to add much in terms of texture. The connections drawn between politics and organized crime feel undernourished, and the movie works best when it remains tightly focused on the three central figures of Frank, Russell and Jimmy. Netflix should be commended for providing one of our most celebrated filmmakers the opportunity to revisit narrative turf adjacent to some of his best movies. But the feeling remains that the material would have been better served by losing an hour or more to run at standard feature length, or bulking up on supporting-character and plot detail to flesh out a series.

-David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter

Martin Scorseseโ€™s โ€œThe Irishmanโ€ is a coldly enthralling, long-form knockout โ€” a majestic Mob epic with ice in its veins. Itโ€™s the film that, I think, a lot us wanted to see from Scorsese: a stately, ominous, suck-in-your-breath summing up, not just a drama but a reckoning, a vision of the criminal underworld thatโ€™s rippling with echoes of the directorโ€™s previous Mob films, but that also takes us someplace bold and new.

-Owen Gleiberman, Variety

And the big ticket world premiere at this festival is its opening-night film, The Irishman, a nearly three-and-a-half-hour gangster epic from New Yorkโ€™s own hero, Martin Scorsese. The Irishman is less literal about its meta moodiness than Pain & Glory is, but it still speaks disarmingly quiet volumes about what the autumn of life might mean for its creator.

-Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair

For much of its duration, The Irishman covers familiar ground but is slickly entertaining, if a little repetitive in the third hour. Thereโ€™s an almost meta-maturity, as if Scorsese is also looking back on his own career, the film leaving us with a haunting reminder not to glamorise violent men and the wreckage they leave behind.

-Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: 4/5

Ultimately, โ€œThe Irishmanโ€ is a major success for Scorseseโ€”not only does it incorporate the best aspects of his past crime dramas and their thrilling energy, but it adds context to those films and wrestles with their legacy resonantly. In a way, โ€œThe Irishmanโ€ fills in the gaps between โ€œGoodfellasโ€ and โ€œCasinoโ€ to tell the overall story of the mobโ€™s rise and fall in postwar America, but it does so while anchored to one manโ€™s story and morality. The law never catches up to Sheeranโ€”not for the real damning stuff anywayโ€” but as Scorsese demonstrates with profound solemnity, he cannot outrun his conscience.

-Joe Blessing, The Playlist: A

Nothing this misshapen ever fliesโ€”Scorsese once managed to make a movie called The Aviator that was similarly overburdenedโ€”yet his all-over-the-place enthusiasm plays nicely against the materialโ€™s death stench. Tidy as it may be to expect, Scorsese doesnโ€™t need to cap his career with a sign-off to the gangster epic; that would be way too sentimental for him. What The Irishman does become, in its final hour, is something better, a film about broken trust, to family and God. De Niroโ€™s Sheeran, like the monks of Scorseseโ€™s magnificent Silence, wrecked by spiritual compromise, can't express his pain. This may not be why the average fan comes to a Marty movie, but itโ€™s the statement this director, now 76, feels like making. After so much brilliance, Scorsese is being too hard on himself (maybe this review is too), but when The Irishman is about doubt, itโ€™s as personal as it gets.

-Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out: 4/5

People will want to see The Irishman because of De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino all in a mob movie again, directed by Martin Scorsese. And, boy, yes, thatโ€™s there. In the scenes where they are younger, the de-aging is โ€ฆ pretty good. Iโ€™d say the best Iโ€™ve seen so far. But itโ€™s one of those things that if you stare at it, yes, you can see the imperfections โ€“ especially when De Niro or Pesci are acting alongside, say, a non-de-aged Ray Romano. But you do get used to it. And the way I look at this is, well, this is the small price to pay to get all these actors together again to tell this story. To star in Martin Scorseseโ€™s phenomenal film about the price we all pay for our sins of youth โ€ฆ even if you or I didnโ€™t kill Jimmy Hoffa. The Irishman is terrific and Netflix got their moneyโ€™s worth.

-Mike Ryan, Uproxx

As much as they take special care to tell the audience that their characters are rotten to the core, Goodfellas and Casino and another spiritual relative, The Wolf Of Wall Street, have been misunderstood as glorifications; itโ€™s an inevitable consequence, perhaps, of following ugly men with occasionally glamorous lives. Scorsese takes no such chances with The Irishman, a crime epic that pushes further forward in time than most, to a truly ignoble end. Eventually, it reminds us, weโ€™re all just fitting ourselves for coffins.

-A. A. Dowd, Uproxx: A-

The film โ€“ at three hours and 19 minutes โ€“ never flags. The Irishman may not be as groundbreaking as Mean Streets or Taxi Driver, but then again, what is?

-Caryn James, BBC: 4/5

Scorsese is so adept at storytelling, and his cast is so unbelievable, that the film, which clocks in at 209 minutes โ€” even longer than The Return of the King and Avengers: Endgame โ€” barely feels its length. The Irishman feels more like being caught in a dream or reminiscence, with all the tenderness weโ€™re willing to afford in those in-between hours. Only Scorsese and his assembled cast, not to mention longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker, could bring that all into reality.

-Karen Han, Polygon

Some may balk at the 209-minute runtime, but thereโ€™s never a moment where this story drags. Indeed, the three-plus hours practically fly by, because weโ€™re so swept up in this decades-long journey. Thereโ€™s not a single second wasted here, because one gets the sense that all the characters are hanging on for dear life โ€“ literally. As the years tick on, and their bodies fail them, The Irishmanโ€˜s main players find themselves closer and closer to oblivion.

-Chris Evangelista, /FILM: 10/10

Five decades is a lot of history to hold together, and it could have easily crumbled. Remember โ€œGottiโ€? But Scorsese is at the top of his game here. His film is never boring, and it explores some unexpectedly deep themes for mafiosos.

-Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post: 4/4

With The Irishman, director Martin Scorsese proves to be in an alluringly funereal mood.

-Keith Uhlich, Slant: 3.5/4

There is no arguing that The Irishman is a masterpiece. It is Scorsese revisiting themes seen in his past work with new elements of excitement, despair, and wit. The great performances and incredible filmmaking make this fictionalized tale of Frank Sheeran a story to end the decade, one that has seen many changes within the film industry โ€” and hopefully introducing a new era of Martin Scorsese.

-Shea Vassar, Filmera: 5/5

For the first two and a half hours of its three-and-a-half-hour runtime, The Irishman is clever and entertaining, to the point where you may think thatโ€™s all itโ€™s going to be. But its last half-hour is deeply moving in a way that creeps up on you, and itโ€™s then that you see what Scorsese was working toward all along.

-Stephanie Zacharek, TIME

A monument is a complicated thing. This one is big and solid โ€” and also surprisingly, surpassingly delicate.

-A. O. Scott, The New York Times

Scorsese is probably the last big-budget filmmaker who mostly declines to tell the audience what to think, much less boldface and underline why heโ€™s telling us a story about self-serving criminals and whether he personally condemns them. โ€œThe Irishmanโ€ doesnโ€™t break with that tradition. The opportunity to sit with the movie later is the main reason to see it. For all its borderline-vaudevillian verbal humor and occasional eruptions of ultraviolence (often done in a single take, and shot from far away) it feels like as much of a collection of thought prompts and images of contemplation as Scorseseโ€™s somber religious epics โ€œThe Last Temptation of Christ,โ€ โ€œKundunโ€ and โ€œSilence.โ€ God is as tight-lipped as Frank.

-Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com: 3.5/4

DIRECTOR

Martin Scorsese

WRITER

Steven Zaillian

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Rodrigo Prieto

EDITOR

Thelma Schoonmaker

Release date:

November 1, 2019 (limited theatrical release)

November 27, 2019 (Netflix)

Budget:

$159,000,000

STARRING

• Robert De Niro as Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran

• Al Pacino as Jimmy Hoffa

• Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino

• Harvey Keitel as Angelo Bruno

• Bobby Cannavale as Felix "Skinny Razor" DiTullio

• Anna Paquin as Peggy Sheeran

• Stephen Graham as Anthony "Tony Pro" Provenzano

• Ray Romano as Bill Bufalino