---
title: "New York, New York (1977) review"
description: "A gorgeous musical that's secretly a horror movie about a monster, and Scorsese has the nerve to stage all of it in blinding Technicolor daylight."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/new-york-new-york/
---

![A still from New York, New York (1977)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/new-york-new-york/backdrop.webp)

# New York, New York (1977)

Aug 25, 2026 | 2 min read | Rated 3 out of 5 | Dir. Martin Scorsese

A gorgeous musical that’s secretly a horror movie about a monster, and Scorsese has the nerve to stage all of it in blinding Technicolor daylight.

Watching 70s movies, I always struggle to calibrate the men. What was the audience meant to find charming, and what did the filmmaker already know was rot. For the first long stretch of this I honestly couldn’t tell. De Niro’s Jimmy corners Francine at a V-J Day party and simply will not leave her alone, and the meet-cute grinds on so long and so uncomfortably that I kept waiting for a signal on how to feel. Then it clicked. There is no cute. He doesn’t charm his way in, he forces it, she tells him no over and over, and by the end Scorsese has made it unmistakable that Jimmy is an abusive, sociopathic monster.

Scorsese takes a story any other director would drown in noir shadow and stages it in the bright, artificial, candy-colored daylight of an old MGM musical, the exact kind he grew up on, all soundstage New York and swooning color. Then he fills that sunny fantasy with an abusive marriage and refuses to look away. There’s a cleansing power to that daylight. It peels the romance off the abuse and just lets you see it, plainly, in full Technicolor.

De Niro is terrifying in a way he rarely is. Not the explosive Travis Bickle register, something quieter and more sociopathic, a simmer. I spent the whole film scanning his face trying to read him, whether he was being supportive or whether there was rage and jealousy coiling underneath, and the answer was almost always the worse one. Knowing he improvised most of that menace off no real script somehow makes it scarier.

Liza Minnelli is extraordinary. Cute as a button, singing like a goddamn rock star, and then quietly devastating in how well she plays cowering fear. The best scene in the movie is when Francine is handed a major-label offer and spends the entire time not celebrating but watching Jimmy, reading his rising contempt, trying to shrink herself small enough to keep him calm. It is infuriating to watch a woman with that much talent make herself that little, and the film knows exactly how infuriating it is.

The problem is it’s too long. Way too fucking long. The domestic stretches drag in a way Scorsese’s later three-hour movies never do, where the cutting is so tight the time vanishes. This one just sags. It made me want to go watch Singin’ in the Rain, which is the second review in a row I’ve said that, so maybe that one’s on me. Still, even lesser Scorsese is crawling with fascinating shots and experiments, and I’m glad I saw it. The performances soar, the sets are incredible, and those last forty minutes of songs genuinely take off. I won’t be back anytime soon. But a beautiful failure from this guy is still more alive than most people’s hits.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/new-york-new-york/)

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