The King of New York

Quite easily the most violent, foul-mouthed and truly nasty of current gangster movies. It might be charitable to say that Ferrara is doing a SCARFACE by pointing up the designer nature of modern urban crime, its brutality and ethnic mixture, and its attempt to infiltrate the mainstream. Certainly, in the person of Walken, spare, elegant, slightly spaced and lording over a black/hispanic gang, the film has an impressively charismatic central character: the kind of powerbroker who does favours for the poor and makes love on subway trains, but still manages the right burst of psychosis when dealing with racist rivals, Chinese nasties, or treacherous black brothers. (Steve Grant)

35mm copy from the Harvard Film Archive.

In the presence of Abel Ferrara.