Critic Reviews
80
Metascore
Generally Favorable
positive
13(87%)
mixed
2(13%)
negative
0(0%)
Showing 15 Critic Reviews
100
Bogart and Cagney are gloriously dark in this gangster tour-de-force.
100
One of the many classic movies from “the greatest of all years”, 1939 (see also The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind and Stagecoach), this epic gangster flick dares to provide psychological back stories for the characters.
91
This is an exciting, sweeping vision of American life, which treats crime like the ultimate small business, crushed by the machinations of the truly powerful.
90
The movie has an epic sweep that anticipated and influenced the best gangster movies of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola of which it is fully the equal. [18 Aug 2010]
90
During the 1930s, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart were masters of the gangster role. They made three films together. Two of them, Angels With Dirty Faces (1938) and The Roaring Twenties (1939), were among the best gangster epics of the decade. [05 Jan 1997, p.48]
88
Raoul Walsh’s essential 1939 gangster movie that turns Prohibition into a tragic nostalgia trip, is a terrifically entertaining film in its own right, rough and witty and fast on its feet in a way that only a ‘30’s Hollywood production could be. But it’s also a historically vital hinge movie of sorts, for its director, for its stars, and even for its genre, which was reaching maturity at the end of the decade that saw its central archetypes created.
88
Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.
88
Walsh and producer Mark Hellinger's classic ultra-tough gangster opus about World War I, Prohibition and good-hearted mobster Jimmy Cagney's breezy rise and grim fall. [18 Feb 2005, p.C6]
80
The over-all tone of the drama—concerning foxhole friends who end up as partners in crime but rivals in love—evokes the flailings of unformed men whom a heedless society tossed in harm’s way and then cast aside.
80
Most impressive for its frantic pace and its suggestion that in times of Depression almost everyone is corruptible, it's also a perverse elegy to a decade of upheaval.
