Martin Scorsese
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Frank Sinatra Gets Whacked October 17, 2024
Cineasts everywhere will be disappointed by the latest news from Martin Scorsese, surely the world’s greatest living director. Not only has he announced that his sure-to-be-controversial film The Life of Jesus has been postponed, but the more commerc...
Movies Can Help to Heal Our Broken World April 29, 2024
In “Hugo” (2011)—a family film directed by Martin Scorsese, and adapted by John Logan from Brian Selznick’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret—movies and dreams are synonymous. Remembering visits to the theater with his deceased father, Hugo (Asa Butt...
Martin Scorsese’s American Tragedy March 08, 2024
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon opens with a holy man’s prayer before a burial. Curiously, this rite doesn’t feature a human body. It’s a pipe. “Tomorrow we will bury this one,” he says, as if speaking about a departed friend. “It is tim...
Martin Scorsese Wants You to Put Down Your Phone February 14, 2024
Even on Zoom, Martin Scorsese knows how to frame the shot. Ostensibly he’s dialed in to talk about his new Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, but as he’s settling in, he adjusts the iPad he’s calling from to make sure his face is framed perfectly by the ...
Lily Gladstone Is Holding the Door Open February 05, 2024
Life was different for Lily Gladstone in the summer of 2020. She had built up a small but impressive résumé in independent films, including two by Kelly Reichardt, “Certain Women” and “First Cow.” But the pandemic had shut down the industry, and she ...
The Limitations of "Killers of the Flower Moon" November 22, 2023
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, by its own admission, is ultimately a failure, but that’s also where the film is at its most provocative. Taking on an infinite scroll-like structure also found in Silence (2016) and The Irishman (2019), ...
Why Is Gen Z So Obsessed With Fran Lebowitz? November 21, 2023
On a Saturday Night in October, I took the B41 bus to Flatbush to hear Fran Lebowitz. As I milled around the Kings Theatre’s gilded lobby with the Fran-fans (hot 20-somethings, married lesbians, members of food co-ops), everybody—even the diehards—se...
Human Weakness in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ November 20, 2023
When the great Martin Scorsese makes a movie—or as he calls it, a picture—it is safe to assume it will be of epic proportions. His latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, certainly fits that description, and its length (3 hours and 25 minutes) is on...
The Price of Guilt November 15, 2023
Containing all the elements of a classic Western, Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon, packs a punch, but it is also psychologically complex and deeply spiritual, and leaves the viewer pondering existential questions: Why does ...
Scorsese’s Moral Vision Shines November 03, 2023
What do we think about when we think about Martin Scorsese? Many of us think about gangster stories, especially ultra-violent, grisly, and operatic ones. He helped bring the genre into the modern age with his masterpieces Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Ca...
The Dark Message of 'Killers of the Flower Moon' October 26, 2023
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is set on the open prairies of Osage County, Okla. Its colors are the colors of a time still in touch with the earth: tree bark and aged leather, bitter blues and drained grayish greens, linen, limestone, ...
The Missing Politics of ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ October 25, 2023
Breathtaking landscapes, impressive performances, stunning 1920s sets and period costumes, greed-fueled murder plots, a majestic and evocative score, sensitivity to the Osage communities whose story the film portrays — all are in abundant evidence th...
‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Justifies Its Lengthy Run Time October 24, 2023
Martin Scorsese’s latest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, arrived over the weekend with plenty of fanfare from cinephiles. (My condolences to anyone watching the movie next to a rowdy screening of The Eras Tour experience.) But while most of the dis...
'Killers of the Flower Moon' Is the Slipperiest of Things October 24, 2023
The early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon are a symphony of pointed dissonance. The director revels in the frantic bustle of the Oklahoma boomtown of Fairfax where most of the film is set — a world of fast, shiny cars, hollerin...
On Marty Moon October 24, 2023
During most of Killers of the Flower Moon, I was thinking of Rick Dalton—ever since Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio are Cliff and Rick to me. When I saw Ad Astra in the fall of 2019, I couldn’t help watching it...
A Slow, Staggering American Conspiracy October 23, 2023
When the World War I veteran Ernest Burkhart (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) gets off the train in Osage County, Oklahoma, he is walking into the turn-of-the-century boomtown of Fairfax, a bustling throng of activity that has sprung up out of nowhere f...
All Eyes on Lily Gladstone October 23, 2023
Before she was cast as the anguished center of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, before she played a grief-stricken mother on Reservation Dogs, and before her breakout role in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women, Lily Gladstone taught school ...
On 'Killers of the Flower Moon' October 23, 2023
Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is a film gnarled up in paradox, not least of these that it’s both a fascinating and a deeply confounding work. It enthralls precisely because it withholds the easy gratifications and familiar reassurances...
The Legend of John Joseph Mathews October 23, 2023
There’s a story that crops up on the margins of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon that’s fascinated me for years. It’s the story of the Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, who, in the 1920s and ’30s, became one of a hauntingly small number of Am...
Marty and Leo: An Essential Pairing October 20, 2023
In an essay in Esquire in 2010, Martin Scorsese laid his chips on the table. “Leonardo and I have made four pictures together,” he wrote. “He is absolutely essential to me, to all of us, and essential to the history of movies.”That last claim is part...
Martin Scorsese’s Soulless Epic October 20, 2023
Thud, thud, thud, thud, thud, thud. Robbie Robertson’s musical score backing “Killers of the Flower Moon” relies heavily on a low, endlessly repeated guitar or bass note that mirrors the soul-deadening events on screen. We’re in 1920s Osage territory...
Martin Scorsese’s 81 Greatest Movie Characters, Ranked October 19, 2023
For roughly 50 years now, since the release of Mean Streets in 1973, really, Martin Scorsese has captivated moviegoers with his stylish, nostalgia-tinged depictions of (mostly) 20th-century America. It’s hard to say if Scorsese has dedicated himself ...
Martin Scorsese on “Killers of the Flower Moon” October 18, 2023
Martin Scorsese has the best curveball in the business. His 2013 film, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” based on the true story of a large-scale financial fraudster, is also his wildest and wackiest comedy, closer in inspiration to Jerry Lewis than to Oliv...
The 20th Century, as Told by Martin Scorsese October 17, 2023
In 1980, the Las Vegas Sun reported on an especially visible marital dispute. A fight had taken place on the front lawn of a modern mansion that all the neighbors knew about. Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Geri McGee Rosenthal were not just rich, but al...
‘The Continental’ Review October 16, 2023
EARLIER THIS WEEK, Lucas Shaw of Bloomberg tweeted, referencing Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, that you “REALLY need to justify a 3 ½ hour movie” in a world where you can make a shorter movie or a six-hour miniseries instead.While it’s...
