Avis Metacritic

Saints can't be what Sopranos was — without the time or the ones who've been lost to tell it, fuggedaboutit. But for a hundred-something minutes, it feels close enough to coming home again.

It’s a sharp, lively, and engrossing movie, one that provides a fascinating running commentary on how the world of “The Sopranos” came into being. Yet we can’t help but notice the difference in tone.

A busier proposition than its HBO forefather, this sets up more than it can pay off. But it does manage to balance fan-service with plenty of rich, original, complex material.

The Many Saints of Newark is smart enough to point out that Livia isn't an anomaly in this world — she's just another borderline-sociopath who has found her place among murderous men.

Sopranos superfans will find plenty to love about the prequel film.

Of course, nobody does a better job of inhabiting their character’s future shell than Michael Gandolfini, whose performance as juvenile delinquent Tony Soprano is such a lived-in riff on his father’s most famous role that it completely transcends the gimmicky task at hand.

Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs.

The late-’60s and early-’70s production and costume design, by Bob Shaw and Amy Westcott, respectively, are rooted firmly in an evocative sense of time and place, enhanced by a soundtrack of pinpoint needle drops. But The Many Saints of Newark is more of a diverting footnote than an invaluable extension of the show’s colossal legacy.

Chase, who co-wrote the script with an alum of his writers’ room, Lawrence Konner, flattens the world of The Sopranos into a generic, vaguely Scorsesian crime epic. At times, the film suggests the shapelessness of a biopic, as though it were beholden to some historical record of facts and figures.

The new characters are all one-dimensional, and we learn nothing new about the old characters from the series.