Critics reviews

Visual tricks (combining the micro and the macro, the private and the public) will reoccur throughout the film, such as in the iconic image of White looking down at the city from his hotel room, the nocturnal city lights obscuring his face, the makeshift super-imposition simultaneously indulging Frank's grandiose ambitions while emphasizing that his illusion of control can't be sustained.

A dialectical masterpiece that's even better and less silly than I remembered, King of New York is anchored by a complex moralism with a dash of fatalistic cynicism that cuts awfully deep in a year of police shootings, dashed political dreams and, of course, more of the same ol'-same ol'.

The film never made a bid for critical respectability like gangster contemporaries like GoodFellas and Miller's Crossing, but it deserves its place among them.