Jay Cocks

In 1846, waves of Irish immigrants poured into the New York neighborhood of Five Points. "Billy the Butcher" bands his fellow "Native Americans" into a gang to take on the Irish gang "The Dead Rabbits," organized by Priest Vallon. After an bloody clash Vallon is dead and his son ends up in a brutal reform school. In 1862, that boy returns to seek vengeance against the man that killed his father.

Tells the story of Newland Archer, whose engagement to an innocent socialite binds him to the codes and rituals of his upbringing. When her cousin arrives in town on a wave of scandal after separating from her husband, she ignites passions in Newland he never knew existed. Swelling with exquisite period detail, this film is an alternately heartbreaking and satirical look at the brutality of old-world America.

In New York City in the 1870s, a rigid social code governs how people talk, walk, meet, part, dine, earn their livings, fall in love, and marry. Not a word of the code is written down anywhere, but these people have been studying it since they were born. In this elegant milieu, marriages, like treaties between nations, exist to provide for the orderly transmission of wealth; scions of old and rich families understand that their personal desires have...