Rating: 
Summary: Unjustly maligned. A great and lyrical film.
Review: There's a lot wrong with Heaven's Gate, but it remains a great American film that has been unjustly maligned by the Vincent Canby school of film criticism (or, better put, film slander). Yes, some of the scenes are too long. And, yes, the audio does suck. But it is otherwise a solid American story, carried-out by capable actors, with fantastic sets and scenery. And it will always retain the post-Vietnam edge shared by Coppola's Apocalypse Now, which was being filmed at the same time and had nearly identical production difficulties (the making of both are chronicled in the book Final Cut). Ultimately, Heaven's Gate suffers primarily from incomplete editing. But I'll take the Hurt valedectory, the rollerskating dance, and the pleasant buggy rides any day. It is the central lyricism of Heaven's Gate, its nearly musical character, that makes it a great - if difficult - American film.
Rating:
Summary: BEAUTIFUL FILM, GREAT PERFORMANCES, SERIOUS SUBJECT
Review: Yes, it's long. Yes, it's slow. Yes, you have to do some thinking to follow along. But, gosh-gee, it's all worth it. Incredibily beautiful and powerful use of film. Thank you, Mr. Cimino.
Rating: 
Summary: Overrated Chimino Finally Falls
Review: Following the excessive praise of The Deer Hunter, a very offensive and unintelligent film, Hollywood was expecting Chimino to be the next Coppola or Houston. This film, however, proved that Chimino was and always will be an overrated "artist."Isn't it interesting that the same thing is happening to Quentin Tarritino 20 years later? I'm so happy that Quentin Tarritino is slowly joining Michael Chimino in the "over-hyped and faded-out" category. Just go away, fellas.
Rating:
Summary: Cimino's Gate
Review: I'm reading all the mixed reviews on Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" and one thing comes to mind...have we all seen the same film! Granted, this is not "Citizen Kane", but why do I keep coming back to watch this film? The sheer scale of this film makes it worth watching, as well as the cinematography and performances. It took a lot of guts to make such a downbeat story in such loving detail. I hate to say this, but this is another one of those films that are hated upon release and claimed as a masterpiece in 30 years by critics and the public alike. I love this film for all the reasons everyone hates it so! Give this film a chance and you will come away enchanted.
Rating:
Summary: Exceptional film-making.
Review: Heaven's GAte is one of the 20 top films ever made. A true classic American film. In fifty years no one will remember the Matrix and Something About Mary, but Heaven's Gate will be discussed by a new generation of film makers and audiences. Watch the film and make up your own mind. Some times myth becomes reality. The myth was that this is one of the worst films ever made, the reality is that it is a classic. The finest film made in the 1980's.
Rating:
Summary: Worst film ever made
Review: There a reason why no saw this. Becaues it is incomprenhable. It makes little sense and is poorly acted by Kristofferson. The movie reall could have cut to about twevlve seconds. Any one who liked this film is a moron and has no sense of what good film making is either. I write Reviews for the long Island Youth Film Society
Rating: 
Summary: Hopelessly muddled.
Review: "Heaven's Gate" is not the absolute atrocity that it has been rumored to be, but, unfortunately, revisionists have egregiously overpraised it in retrospective (in Europe it is regarded as a masterpiece). This is not a good film, let alone a great one, though it is not much worse than Cimino's insipid and insipidly overpraised "The Deer Hunter." What we have in "Heaven's Gate," I think (it's impossible to really know what we have here), is an attempt at a Marxist frontier epic (this is a war picture, not a western), with a plot concerning, in the simplest terms, a revolt of immigrant proletarians against a brutal, fascistic capitalist regime, a cattle company. Cimino may have made this as apologia for his grotesque depiction of the Vietnamese in "Deer Hunter," but he lacks the brilliance it would take to make a grand Leftist statement (for an example of a semi-great leftist epic, see Warren Beatty's "Reds"). "Heaven's Gate" is ultimately a hodgepodge of several interesting, if not coherent, set pieces, some decent performances, some astonishingly poor performances, excellent cinematography, atrocious sound, long, long stretches of boredom, and many terrible scenes. About one-third really intriguing, two-thirds really bad.
Rating: 
Summary: EXCELLENT FILM... UNSURE WHY CRITICS HATED IT
Review: BY:ANTHONY BENEDETTO YOU EVER SEE A MOVIE THAT'S JUST PLAIN FUN.. SOMETIMES EMPTY FUN.. SORT LIKE HEAVEN'S GATE ONLY THERE'S A DAZZLING STORY TO GO WITH IT. JEFF BRIDGES IS A HOOT. A LITTLE BIT LONG BUT WELL WORTH THE WAIT FOR A SPECTAULAR FINISH SO SIT BACK GET SOME POPCORN AND JUST WATCH DONT ANALYZE
Rating:
Summary: Misunderstood by most critics. Great, brilliant detail.
Review: This movie gives you a story of people and the struggle to survive. Criticized for what ever reasons most critics missed the intent and lived up to thier common mistake of "missing the point." Real characters which share all of our own common emotions are what this film is about. How could anyone not feel the impact of the last scene while watching the formal Marshll (Kristofferson) suffer is fate with trembling chin. The opening scene of the immigrant camps left me motivated to see the end. Cimino at his best. Kristofferson was underated on this one. See it again and you will get the point.
Rating:
Summary: Cimino's Hellish Disaster
Review: I was one of the people who went to see this movie when it first came out in New York City - if you blinked, you missed it because it was pulled after one week! That's an indication of how bad this movie really is. While I was watching the movie, I started trying to read lips because the sound was just so horrendous, you could barely hear or understand what was being said - I'm not kidding. I could hear wagon wheels turn and horses trot better than I could the actor's voices. By the end of the movie my glutimus maximus was numb - along with the expressions on the audience's faces. You could hear a pin drop in the place - then the avalanche of boos and scathing reviews started pouring down. I've never experienced anything like it before or since. The scenery and music is fantastic, everything else is truly horrendous. Cimino had over 200 hours of film which needed to be cut down to between 2 and 3 hours - it's impossible to make a cohesive, intelligent movie from such a huge amount of film - storylines get trimmed or cut completely leaving you to wonder what the heck is going on or why certain things seemed disjointed and/or untold. You're left wondering how someone who created a spectacular movie like The Deer Hunter could have become so self-absorbed that he created a disaster of enormous proportions. $40 million might not seem like much nowawdays, but in 1980, it was a heckuva lot of money. (It's equivalent to $100,000,000 today!) Such a shame that Cimino threw his career down the toilet with this movie.
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