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Martin Scorsese and innumerable conspirators have struggled for almost three decades to produce Gangs of New York, and yet it is a terrible movie. This hellish horror of failed ambition should freeze the blood of any artist who has held too long to a primal obsession and fears that a life's work will be shown up as a Promethean folly.

A respected colleague thinks it’s "the best Western since Unforgiven," and I look forward to his review. But the defenders of Scorsese's poorest pictures of the past decade, like Casino, will surely again sound like minions of a cult, humming Scorsese’s praises just because he’s Scorsese. Those who give Gangs of New York an 'A' for its aspiration will be deceiving themselves about this clotted, overproduced historical epic. This is not Sergio Leone, or Once Upon a Time in Nolita. As with the preposterous raves for the undernourished Bringing out the Dead, the improvident praise for this clumsy, puerile picture has already begun, with Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, the grandest quote courtesan of them all, anointing it his movie of the year.

The violent story is both simple and unduly complicated; a coming-of-age narrative in which a young boy enters manhood by seeking revenge against someone who becomes a father figure to him. Personal vendettas play out against a social backdrop that is readily footnoted, but almost impossible to follow on screen. Leonardo DiCaprio, who is joyously carefree in Catch Me If You Can, is a puffy cipher as Amsterdam Vallon, a young man who exits Hellgate House of Reform after sixteen years into the Five Points, the nation's most reviled slum, in Civil War-era Manhattan. He has one goal: revenge on the gang boss who murdered his father, "Bill the Butcher" Cutting (Daniel Day-Lewis, the baroque character of his garb, lingo and epic hamming screaming Oscar). They share the love of a damaged young woman, a spirited cutpurse named Jennie Everdeane (Cameron Diaz, who gives a focused performance even when her speeches are schematic). There’s a bustle of other characters, particularly well-acted by Brendan Gleeson and also by Jim Broadbent, whose performance as corrupt Boss Tweed is a marvel of harrumphing complexity.

The dandified result is of the variety David Mamet dismisses as "pageant." As lively as a diorama, It preens, it postures; its streets are cluttered with props and costumes and Dante Ferretti’s lovely battered buildings, yet the characters aren’t interesting and its depiction of gang slaughter and the decade’s violent Draft Riots are more self-important than self-explanatory. Scorsese’s many interviews explicating all his sound and fury is about as relevant as the horribly misguided, redundant voiceover. Blood and capital was spilled, we get that point. But it is all indicated instead of dramatized, willed instead of embodied. This is chilly work that attempts a hot surface, wanting to be an operatic rendition of a lost era in Manhattan’s dirty, brutal history. (In this Sunday’s New York Daily News, veteran New York observer Pete Hamill damned any pretense to verisimilitude: "The true tale is part of all our histories, not a simple entertainment, and we ignore it at our own peril.")

Whether Gangs of New York was cut to two hours or ran a full three, as an earlier version reportedly did, I still cannot imagine the jerrybuilt fiction of this epic historical disaster to have any emotional impact. It is history as fever dream; a sweeping narrative of revenge in which the man who seeks revenge is a barely acted nobody, and the one upon whom revenge is wished is a glorious burlesque villain. (It's as if Joe Pesci's sociopath Tommy DeVito was the central character of Goodfellas rather than Ray Liotta's Henry Hill.)

Scorsese’s visual vocabulary is seldom composed of telling images—note Roman Polanski's upcoming The Pianist by contrast for superlative use of capturing meaning through metaphor and telling juxtapositions. Shockingly, Scorsese resorts to editing and image-manipulation techniques that seem drawn more from the grammar of coming-attractions trailers rather than the abundant loam of classical cinema in which Scorsese steeps. I'm sure he could tell you what he's quoting in each sequence, but that is the stuff of DVD commentaries and not of the sweet mystery of competent storytelling. Yet the ending is majestic, standing tall above the windy disaster that precedes those transcendent instants.

After the film’s lengthy riot climax, when the smoke has cleared and the bodies have been buried, Amsterdam and Jennie are sepia figures atop a ridge of the cemetery that overlooks the island. One last voice-over explains and reassures and clanks like lead. They leave the frame and we see dissolves through a series of Berenice Abbott-style tableaux ushering in successive eras of New York and its burgeoning architecture. The Brooklyn Bridge arrives, its sweep across the CinemaScope frame; a 1920s skyline, then 1940s. The eye measures, muses what final skyline we will be left with? We know the image that would be perfect, a skyline that will not fit the frame but that extends far enough downtown to include it.

And there is more: the mood is just right, even if the U2 song playing to the credits is unmemorable. The music fades. The names continue. Sound fades up: distant street traffic. Taxi horns carom randomly off the sides of buildings. A cross-town bus moans. A car alarm bleats. No voices, only the taken-for-granted machines of progress. The sounds of twenty-first-century civilization, blooming like flowers in spring. And silence, several minutes of silence. I wish Scorsese had made a film as beautiful as those two masterstrokes—as wistful, as heartfelt, as wondrous, as meaningful, and I would have cried for 165 minutes instead of only five.

In terms of emotional engagement, The Pianist, Roman Polanski's brilliant, wrenching return to form, is a demonstration of a true master at work. Nothing seems familiar; disorientation described with exacting formal precision is one part of what makes this description of one Jewish man's experiences in the Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis so brilliant. Adrien Brody's turn in what is by definition a passive role--a man who must hide, a pianist who must remain silent, an artist who must carry bricks, a sensitive man who must take insult--carries not the weight of the world, but of a soul. Anyone who shivers at the idea of another depiction of the Holocaust should reconsider: a great artist at the height of his powers offers an act of witness, transferring his experiences as a child in the Krakow Ghetto to those of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman.

Adaptation is also a possible masterpiece, another movie that was delayed several times after a prolonged post-production period and yet its surely long-in-the-planning posters and advertising art tell you nothing about the movie's comic and dramatic brilliance. But why should it? This is a movie destined to be released at the awards season; its hothouse brilliance needs to be nurtured by the hot air of critical adulation. Not that it's unworthy. Moment to moment it may be the most thrilling thing I've seen all year. It’s one of the trickiest movies you’ll ever see, a comedy-drama-thriller-satire whose heart is as large and mutable and volatile as the life’s work of the driven characters on screen, two writers--journalist Susan Orlean, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman--who have written themselves into mediations upon "adaptation," as the splicing of oneself onto the work of another, or the survival of orchids in nature, adapting their beauty to whatever factors are thrown upon them, and in its own inspired, glorious fashion, describes the inner workings of the creative mind, the curious heart.

If heartbreaking renditions of the human condition don't strike a festive chord, you could wait for Paramount and Miramax's The Hours, Stephen Daldry's film of playwright David Hare's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-Prize winning three-narrative novel, in which you get three potential suicides for the price of one. But there's a Philip Glass score, so how could it be a downer? Joking aside, its quiet intelligence impressed me, others will tell you about the performances by Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, but I will mention that Seamus McGarvey’s varied cinematography is luminous and exquisite. I also enjoyed smaller parts, including Clare Danes as Streep’s daughter, Jeff Daniels, and Toni Colette is comedy and tragedy in one conflicted package.

A more operatic dramatic effort is Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, which will expand to more theaters as increasing numbers of nods come its way; the New York Film Critics Circle awarded it a torrid five of eight possible citations. Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her is even more tear-stained, a male weepie about the love of women that retains his irreverence while burnishing his knack for baroque décor and plot turns.

The most euphoric of the season's releases may be the musical Chicago, with Catherine Zeta-Jones smashing as a 1920s hoofer-turned-killer pitted for publicity against fresh-faced murderer Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger, charming but unglamorously lit). The camera swirls and the camera swirls and I could only think: I miss Bob Fosse.