Weak is being particularly harsh with some of those films. Probably not to your taste, but "weak" is a bit extreme in my view - I'd agree with Bringing out the dead (I often forget he made it) which is a bit of a pointless endeavour, but I can see some merit in all the other ones (even though there's a couple I'm not a big fan of).
Yeah, "weak" can't do all the work I wanted it to do. For those films (Age of Innocence, Casino, Bringing Out the Dead, The Aviator, Hugo, Wolf of Wall Street, Flower Killers on the Moon) I felt he was either trying very hard to be anti-Scorsese or he was leaning to hard into Scorsese mythos.
• Age Of Innocence was very boring in my view. Winona did not and does have the chops and had no on screen chemistry with her co-stars. Winona was a doe-eyed waif and trying to make her a dumb virgin losing DDL's affections to Michelle Pfeiffer just was weird. Trying to make a drama about manners just wasn't a good fit. I saw it so long ago, maybe I'd like it more now, but at the time it felt bloodless. I know it's a faithful adaption of a novel I didn't read, but I didn't like it.
• Casino was unnecessary and just made me want to watch Goodfellas for an additional time, and it felt like someone making a Scorsese knock-off.
• Bringing Out The Dead. I love Nicolas Cage and this should have been a really eerie, gripping, dive into madness. I know the purposeful way the scenes echoed Frank's hallucinations and his inability to sort reality and days was intentional but it felt like it started at a certain emotional pitch and never went anywhere. Cage was probably miscast, too.
• The Aviator. I found DiCaprio's performance wooden, the movie rushed, the CGI laughable. Bio-pics are hard.
• Hugo was half infatuation with silent movie tropes and half stupid kids movie (remember Sacho Baron Cohen?). The 3D element was such a gimmick and half the time the movie didn't use it all. If anything, it should only have been 3D when Hugo was inside the clock. It was a boring, pointless film.
• Wolf Of Wall Street rankled. I hated it. I hated the characters, and the fact they were based on real people blurred the line (was there even a line?) between "look at what we got away with" and a chronicle of the times. Wall Street, Bright Lights Big City, and even American Psycho did a better job of ridiculing those days, and touches like diCaprio's car changing colors during narration were total wankery. I think if you set up repugnant characters like Hill and DiCaprio in a film like this, you want some sort of day of judgment, and these feckers didn't get it. If it would have ended with all of those people shot to pieces or leaping from high buildings, I would have liked it more.
• Finally, Killers of the Flower Moon: in my opinion it needed an editor to come and turn it into a 2-hour movie. It did not support the 3 1/2 hour run time because it was so repetitive, slow, and lacked any momentum. I also thought DiCaprio was terrible in it, and the cavalcade of gnarled, grizzled cowboy characters DiCaprio kept contracting with made his portrayal look even more ridiculous than it would have otherwise been.
