The Many Saints of Newark reviews

[Big Magilla]

The user reviews on IMDb. are about the worst I've seen for any movie.

All of them, as well as all of the professional critics' reviews I've read, were from fans of The Sopranos. I would really like to know what non-fans of the show think.

I watched the first season and part of the second season, but that was it for me, so I approached the film with no expectations. What I found was a decent three-star film with a good lead performance by Alessandro Nivola but a supporting cast that was all over the place.

Leslie Odom, Jr. was very good but his storyline didn't quite merge with the rest of the narrative. Corey Stoll was good as always, but given very little to do. Same with Vera Farmiga and the other female cast members. Ray Liotta, in a dual role, shamelessly overacted in one of them but underacted appreciably in the other.

Nothing Oscar worthy here, but nothing to have an angst attack over, either.

[Sabin]

This one was always a long shot. David Chase hasn't really translated to film in a meaningful way. Not Fade Away (which I haven't seen) did disastrous business. And this doesn't look like it's going to change that batting average. Not a contender.

https://variety.com/2021/tv/reviews/the ... 235069803/

We want “The Many Saints of Newark” to spin a good yarn, and for the most part it does. But the thing we most want from this movie, which arrives 14 years after “The Sopranos” ended, is a sense of revelation. We want it to show us how Tony Soprano, growing up as a “normal” Italian-American teenager, slipped onto the road that would lead him to become a gangster sociopath. We need to see him take that first step. The movie may have convinced itself that it shows it to you. But sorry, watching “The Many Saints of Newark,” this “Sopranos” fan found Tony’s “evolution” toward the dark side to be even less convincing than Anakin Skywalker’s transformation into Darth Vader at the climax of “Revenge of the Sith.” At the end, I felt like we needed a second prequel, or maybe just that essential TV thing: another episode.

https://www.indiewire.com/2021/09/the-m ... 234666245/

For better or worse, but always inevitably, Chase’s long-awaited prequel movie “The Many Saints of Newark” is split between those opposing tendencies. Directed with unfussy confidence by “Sopranos” veteran Alan Taylor, it wants to give people more of a show they love because of how forcefully it argues that more is never enough. The result, almost by design, is equal parts gratuitous fan service and gripping mob drama; a clumsy devil’s handshake of a film that’s asphyxiated to death by the same mythology it also leverages into a masterful origin story about cyclical violence and the sins of the father. The power of a prequel is that it can make everything we’ve already seen feel like predestination, but “The Many Saints of Newark” so insistently renders the past as prologue that it sometimes forgets the past has to be present first.

GRADE: B-

https://www.avclub.com/the-many-saints- ... 1847715847

“Who made Tony Soprano?” screams the poster for The Many Saints Of Newark, David Chase’s slick flashback to the fabled, formative salad days of his most famous character. Doctor Melfi had theories on the matter; they came up often during her heated sessions with the don. Janice, older sister of New Jersey’s most stressed-out mob boss, posed the question differently: “What’s wrong with our family?” she asked Tony in “The Knight In White Satin Armor,” one of the great episodes of the great HBO series that bore their name. With Saints, the creator finally attempts something of an answer. Unfortunately, what he comes up with in this over-plotted Sopranos prequel is much less interesting than what he planted in our heads over six seasons.

GRADE: C