Beautiful, moving film.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

This movie proceeds very slowly, it could have been shortened by an hour. That said, the story and acting are very good. The sound not so much. Isabelle Huppert, Kristofferson, Jeff Bridges and the rest of the cast are amazing.

Heaven's Gate… William Shakespeare, in Sonnet 29, expresses much about human nature in fourteen lines. Heaven's Gate, the Michael Cimino movie, takes what seems like fourteen hours to express nothing with any clarity. Ostensibly based upon 'real events' in 1890 - the conflict in Jackson County, Wyoming, between poverty-stricken immigrants and wealthy cattle farmers - it lasts a very long 219 minutes in the Director's cut. We watched the entire bewildering chaotic brilliant epic, and I could not take my attention away from it, even though I wanted to slash whole chunks of it out. It is difficult, too long, challenging, and exasperating; and that made me think it is like many great works of fiction. Set pieces of real wonder were interspersed with longueurs which made me want to hit Cimino in the face for allowing such self indulgence. But then along comes another unforgettable image, another astounding realisation of visionary genius, and you will forgive Cimino anything. Almost.I will have to sit through this film again. Which is how I felt after reading Ulysses, Moby Dick, and Wolf Solent the first time. Greatness and banality can so often become mired together. Heaven's Gate is a great curate's egg of a movie that, because of the good parts, I will revisit because I must. It is undoubtedly a bloody but glorious mess, and a seriously loving edit would get it running faster over a shorter distance. The opening college sequence, for instance, is obviously in need of a very large but affectionate trim. Far too much dancing and huddling, many more caps in the air than necessary, hurtling along ancient streets shown far too much, and so many unfunny giggling japes; if it is not an hour too much it seems like it. The movie launches itself at the audience exultantly, but then reveals a cinematic disregard without engagement or character involvement. Good actors are wasted. We get tantalising shots that need fleshing out. Vast sequences are filled with hordes of people, every one of them too anonymous to grab our sympathy or attention. It is a pageant of multitudes without illumination, a coarse quantity rather than a telling focus. It is constantly beguiling and frustrating. And it is undoubtedly a masterpiece.

I'm watching this movie and it seems so familiar, but I can't point my finger at anything specific. Then at the end I see that movie is written and directed by Michael Cimino, same guy who did The Deer Hunter. This is one very strange movie. It possess touch of magnificence and epic greatness, but at the same time it is unbelievable crap. Original length was 5 hours, but after fiasco in theaters it was cut to 3,5 hours and it is still inhumanely stretched considering what movie has to offer. If it would somehow pull off to keep that epic charm and greatness being cut to 90 minutes I would give it 9/10, but as it chokes like high-school textbook for boring subject and loses itself in vagueness, I can't go above 6/10.Heaven's Gate was complete fiasco and it caused bankruptcy of United Artist studio, which is sold to MGM for small price because of that. Also, this movie killed popularity of western genre during the rest of 80's decade."It fails so completely that you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter and the Devil has just come around to collect" - New York TimesBut after all, it is still worth watching, because it simply has that something...

I watched the full 3-1/2-hour+ version in a Brooklyn movie theater. It was not fun. Maybe it would have been funner if the theater was less full and I could stretch out my legs and relax, but we were packed in, and my neighbor to the right kept rubbing against me (accidenally), and a head in front of me kept bobbing up and down. (Like a middle-seat plane ride to Jackson Hole.) Heaven's Gate is a movie with spectacular scenes, especially the dance numbers and roller-skating numbers, but ultimately it was a big and very bloody mess, whose characters were both incoherently drawn and incoherent (at times I was thinking this was the first mumblecore movie, thanks to the gravelly, sotto voce Kris Kristofferson (I forgot what a great- looking man he was, that's something to see)). I also forgot that the movie was based on historical events, which made it somewhat more interesting for me, but I would rather have read a book about the Johnson County War than see this movie. The best scenes are the earliest ones, set at Harvard in 1870, where Kris Kristofferson, John Hurt and others celebrate their graduation with marching bands, drunken speeches, elaborate waltzes, and some aggressive sport. Once the scene shifts out to Wyoming (filmed in Montana), the movie becomes elliptical and obscure, and it didn't have to be that way. The elements of a coherent plot are there, but the director preferred to be a bit of a mystic, and to let the viewer decipher the relationships among the people, and figure out for themselves why they went from Massachusetts to Wyoming. But most viewers are not going to care, and will not want to figure it all out.Look, according to another review on IMDb, this is one of the big 3 expensive flops of all time (along with Ishtar and Waterworld). Thus, it's worth seeing, but a nice supply of Adderall might help you along.