A soul-deep mix of medical extremity and spiritual reckoning, Bringing Out the Dead lets Cage sink into the bleary mania of a man strung out on his inability to make a difference.

| Jan 22, 2025

Chaotic, challenging, and even infuriating.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 25, 2024

Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead is a mélange of moods and genres ranging from Gothic horror to Bergmanesque spiritual rumination.

| Sep 16, 2024

... revisiting the film brings with it a different response as the chaos is easier to sort through, to identify, and, oddly, to relate to.

| Sep 16, 2024

It seems like Bringing Out the Dead should be highly complex and multi-layered, but it's unlikely that anyone would walk out of the theater at its conclusion with new insight on anything.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 30, 2023

Anyone who’s seen [Taxi Driver] will find the evolution from bitter cynicism to persisting hope here illuminating, both for what it says about Scorsese’s growth as an artist and as a human.

| Oct 21, 2023

A smart, urgent and compulsively entertaining blend of the personal, political and religious, this stands among both Scorsese's and Schrader's most accomplished statements.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 13, 2022

Episode 54: After Hours / Bringing Out the Dead / The Irishman

| Original Score: 90/100 | Dec 1, 2021

Somebody let Nic Cage drive an ambulance... and that somebody is Scorsese. This is mostly brutal fun...

| May 29, 2020

The new picture comes supplied with the same tension [as Taxi Driver], but, though I hate to say so, it feels like a package.

| Apr 14, 2020

It's an older, wiser Scorsese and Schrader back together 23 years after 'Taxi Driver' telling the story of another insomniac basket case driving around New York City late at night. Except now instead of an avenging angel he's on a mission of mercy.

| Apr 5, 2020

There is no denying Scorsese is one of American cinema's most astonishing directors, but I honestly think it is high time Bringing Out the Dead was revisited and given another chance.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 19, 2019

I congratulate Martin Scorsese on this miraculous triumph over his personal demons, and pray for the swift recovery of his art.

| Aug 21, 2009

A frankly disturbing experience since Cage is at his most manic, the images are brutal, the documentary-style background intense and the (inevitable) theme of redemption a long time emerging.

| Sep 17, 2008

Its hard-to-pin-down tone is frighteningly original -- simultaneously world-weary and adolescent with an aura of perpetual anxiety, as if the characters and filmmakers were in pursuit of a catharsis everyone knows will never come.

| Sep 17, 2008

Scorsese is married to a script that drags him down, keeps him from taking wing as a pure artist.

| Original Score: C | Aug 11, 2007

Martin Scorsese is a wonderful filmmaker. And he loves New York. He is at his best, though, when he has an interesting story to tell.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jul 14, 2007

An exciting, invigorating return to old preoccupations. Welcome home, Marty.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Of course, it's immaculately crafted and exhilaratingly paced, but in the end it's never as emotionally involving as it could and should be.

| Jun 24, 2006

However muddled the story gets, Scorsese guarantees Bringing Out the Dead remains a pulsating trip.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 23, 2005