Killers of the Flower Moon: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT/SEE IT. Disappointing (with caveats elucidated below). Wait to watch it when it hits streaming.

To say I was excited to see Killers of the Flower Moon, the new film from iconic director Martin Scorsese, would be a terrible understatement. Scorsese is, along with Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa, among the most pivotal filmmakers in developing my incurable cinephilia, and when a film of his is released, it’s a major event in my life.

As a teenager, when I discovered Scorsese’s masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull (years after they were initially released) it was a holy experience that converted me into a true believer in the church of cinema.

Ever since that time I’ve been an ardent admirer and devout fan of Scorsese. That doesn’t mean I’ve loved all of his films…because I haven’t, but it does mean that I’ve always taken them very seriously and treated them with the deep respect they deserve having come from a master filmmaker.

Killers of the Flower Moon, which is directed and co-written by Scorsese and is based on the non-fiction book of the same name by David Grann, premiered in theaters on October 20th. Unfortunately, due to circumstances well beyond my control, I was unable to see the film until this past weekend. My nearly month long wait to see the film was excruciating as I had to quarantine myself and avoid any and all mentions of the film in the media/internet in order to stay clear of reviews and opinions. See, I don’t care what anyone else thinks of Scorsese’s films, I only care what I think.

I finally trekked out to the cineplex here in flyover country to see the three-and-a-half-hour-long film on Sunday, and the context of my viewing is a crucial caveat to my opinion on the movie.

Here in flyover country the local RC Theater is a fucking shithole, but it’s the only fucking shithole theater in town. The theater has shitty digital projectors, egregiously awful sound, refuses to turn the lights all the way off in the theater, and doesn’t have screens big enough to accommodate certain aspect ratios. So, I watched Killers of the Flower Moon with a projector that froze seven times, sound that rendered much dialogue inaudible and ambient sound injuriously loud, a condensed screen that cut off heads and compressed expansive vistas, staff members talking loudly in the projector room, and lights on at the top and sides of the theater that made it feel like I was watching a movie at an old drive-in during an especially sunny day.

Besides that, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? To be fair, I’m not sure how, or even if, me or Mrs. Lincoln can answer that question.

The reality is that upon viewing the film under these frustrating and infuriating circumstances, I thought Killers of the Flower Moon simply didn’t work, but I feel like I need to see it again under better circumstances before I can truly say. It is quite an indictment of our theater system that I will need to wait until the movie becomes available to stream at home before I can properly view and review it.

With that context in place, let’s dive into my thoughts on Scorsese’s 26th feature film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The film, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro and Lily Gladstone, tells the story of a vast criminal conspiracy perpetrated by Whites against the Native American population living on the Osage Indian reservation in Oklahoma in the 1920s. I will avoid any more in-depth discussion of the plot in order to avoid spoilers.

I have not read the book so the plot was a mystery to me before seeing the movie. The story is unquestionably an important one, but the film lacks a cohesive storytelling approach and the narrative is at times barely coherent.

I am someone who actually prefers long movies (hell…I thought The Gangs of New York and Silence should have been LONGER), and Killers of the Flower Moon runs a daunting two hundred and six minutes long, but unfortunately it doesn’t earn that arduous run time. Despite so much screen time with which to work, the characters are under developed, the plot muddled and the drama neutered.

A major issue with the film is that its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, is horribly miscast. DiCaprio plays the dim-witted Ernest Burkhart, who sports an atrocious haircut, a perpetual frown and some fake, 1920’s idiot teeth. DiCaprio’s Ernest looks like he is the long-lost uncle of Sling Blade and the surly twin brother of Ben Stiller’s retarded character Simple Jack from Tropic Thunder.

Yes, there are the usual DiCaprio histrionics in Killers of the Flower Moon, as he weeps and wails and rends his garments like a toddler in a tantrum, but it all seems terribly vacant and dramatically ridiculous.

DiCaprio’s standing as the “greatest actor of his generation” has always felt slightly unearned to me as he often gives performances that are sub-par but which are filled with enough hyper-emoting to convince the uninitiated into believing he’s some great artiste. He’s much more an unabashed movie star than he is a great actor. That’s not to say he hasn’t given good and even great performances, because he certainly has (and these are all of them…What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Catch Me If You Can, Inception, Django Unchained, The Wolf of Wall Street, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), but often times, especially with Scorsese, he doesn’t.

This is DiCaprio’s sixth film with Scorsese and in most of them he has been at the very least outshined by his cast mates, and in some of them actively awful.

For example, in Gangs of New York, DiCaprio gives a relentlessly hollow performance and is absolutely blown off the screen by Daniel Day Lewis doing Daniel Day Lewis things. In The Aviator he seems like a little kid playing dress up as Howard Hughes. In The Departed, he gives a solid performance, but which at times feels forced and is definitely overshadowed by Matt Damon. Shutter Island is a mess of a movie and his performance is middling at best. The one exception is The Wolf of Wall Street, where Leo brings all of his star power and acting ability to bear and hits it out of the park.

I was hoping DiCaprio brought that Wolf of Wall Street level of acting to Killers of the Flower Moon…but he doesn’t. He is simply too bright-eyed to play such a dead-eyed dolt like Ernest, and his attempts to energize his performance with dramatic histrionics rings horribly hollow.

Robert DeNiro does very solid work as William King Hale, the local leader of questionable intent. DeNiro’s last two outings with Scorsese, this and The Irishman, have been the best work of the last two decades, and it’s nice to see him flex his considerable acting muscles once again.

Lily Gladstone, who plays Mollie, Ernest’s Osage wife, eclipses her more famous co-star DiCaprio by giving a simple and subtle performance that radiates with charisma. Gladstone speaks volumes with a simple look and never over emotes or feels the need to press like DiCaprio does. She lets her compelling (and gorgeous) face tell the story.

The supporting cast features some truly dreadful performances, most notably, and unfortunately, by the Native American actresses. I will not name names but will say that there are some super cringy moments where a certain actress gives such an amateurish performance that it actually hurts to watch.  

Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer on the film and while there are some notable sequences, such as a burning farm sequence, the rest seems very ordinary. To be fair, as explained earlier my viewing experience was not ideal so maybe I was just not able to appreciate Prieto’s genius (and he is undoubtedly a fantastic cinematographer), but what I did see underwhelmed. For instance, early in the film there is a bunch of black and white Newsreel footage that gives the history of the setting and story that looks like a cheap flashback sequence in a bad tv show.

Then there is the ending, which I will refrain from giving specifics, only to say that this coda is, in the context of my viewing, gut-punchingly bad, especially when combined with the film opening with Scorsese reading a statement to camera that looks like a hostage video and sounds like it was written by the terrorists in the human resources department at Apple Corp.

Overall, I found Killers of the Flower Moon to be a terrible disappointment because my expectations were so high. It isn’t a great movie, but it isn’t awful either. That said, I really do reserve the right to change my opinion once I get to see it at home under better technical circumstances. I hope the film gets better upon my second viewing (which according to reports will probably be in late December or early January) because the story it tells is a vitally important one, and the director telling it is among the greatest to ever make a movie. But for now, it pains me to say that Killers of the Flower Moon is simply not worth seeing the theater…which may have more to do with how awful the theater experience has become than it does with the film…we’ll see.

Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

Pain Hustlers (Netflix): A Review - Phony and Forgettable

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. A remarkably empty cinematic exercise that is neither insightful nor entertaining.

Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans, in the new Netflix movie that tells the tale of Eliza Drake, a stripper in Florida who becomes a highly successful pharmaceutical saleswoman of fentanyl who gets caught up in a corporate criminal conspiracy.

The film, directed by David Yates and written by Wells Tower, is based on the book of the same name by Evan Hughes and is a true story.

I had heard little about Pain Hustlers before checking it out on Netflix. All I knew was that it was in some way about the pharmaceutical industry and the opioid epidemic, and that is starred Emily Blunt. I am all too familiar with the opioid epidemic and its devastating effects, and I like Emily Blunt, so I thought I’d give the movie a shot.

I regret that decision.

Pain Hustlers is one of those movies, which are all too common in the streaming era, that is instantaneously forgettable. The images and story pass before your eyes and evaporate into the ether before you can even register their existence. This film is so forgettable it feels like I never actually watched it…even though I know I did because I wish I hadn’t.

The story at the heart of the film is interesting enough I suppose, as Eliza Drake’s rise from poverty and fall from grace have great dramatic potential, but everything about the film, its writing, its direction, the acting…is poor.

Let’s start with the casting. I think Emily Blunt is a terrific actress. I just rewatched Sicario and she is phenomenal in that great movie. She’s also outstanding in The Devil Wears Prada and A Quiet Place. But in Pain Hustlers she is painfully miscast as a white trash Florida woman who’ll do just about anything to make ends meet. Emliy Blunt is as an actress is, and can be, many things…Florida white trash isn’t one of them.

Blunt is simply too beautiful, too classy and too put together to ever be white trash. Put her in sweatpants and she doesn’t look cheap she looks like an elegant and chic woman in sweatpants. It’s not her fault…it’s just the way things are.

Due to Blunt’s natural grace and style her Eliza never seems too down and out for us to think she or her daughter are in true peril. And when Eliza climbs the ladder of the two-bit corporation that hires her to sell pain medication, it isn’t all that compelling because Blunt makes Eliza seem like she’s well above the low-rent operation anyway.

Chris Evans plays Pete Brenner, the hard-charging pharma salesman who brings Eliza into the fold. Chris Evans is a truly terrible actor and always has been…but just when you think he couldn’t get any worse as an actor, he gives us Pete in Pain Hustlers. Evans puts on an absolute clinic in awful acting in this movie.

Evans, a native of Massachusetts, is remarkable in that he often times as Pete – but not always, attempts a Boston accent, and yet still butchers it. That the accent comes in and out is forgivable only because, like a toddler trying to play drums, it’s so awful you’re glad he occasionally stops trying.

Evans is one of those atrocious actors who thinks he’s really, really good. Like you can see it in his eyes that he thinks this performance as Pete is definitely Best Supporting Actor ground he’s confidently marching across. This level of irrational confidence no doubt helps Chris get the ladies in real life, but the camera is a bullshit detector and it sees right through a dimwit charlatan like Chris Evans.

The always entertaining Catherin O’Hara plays Eliza’s white trash mom Jackie and somehow manages to not be entertaining at all. O’Hara’s Jackie is nothing but a walking caricature and never manifests as a human being, just an annoyance. If she played this character in this way in a three-minute comedy sketch you’d still think it was shallow.

Andy Garcia plays Dr. Neel, the founder of the pharma company in question, and his performance, which he seems to think is fantastic, is instead flaccid. Garcia huffs and puffs and crazies his way through the role but it all feels like a put on and not an actual performance emulating a real person.

Besides the casting and acting, the direction is as second rate as it gets. David Yates, whose claim to fame is having directed 7 of the Harry Potter/Fantastic Beasts films, tries to turn Pain Hustlers into a combination of Wolf of Wall Street and Goodfellas set in the strip-mall pharma world in Florida, but wildly misses the mark.

Yates interjects black and white interview segments into the film to make it all seem “real”, but these segments are legitimately bad as everything comes across as ultra-phony. It doesn’t help that the performances in those black and white interview segments are particularly bad.

Yates also uses a voice-over (Goodfellas style) that doesn’t propel the narrative but just feels like a cheap way to cover over the glaring flaws in the cinematic storytelling. As my film school editing professor once told me, “voice-overs are bad…unless your Scorsese…and nobody is Scorsese.” David Yates is certainly not Scorsese.

The film is consistently visually stale, the performances are relentlessly uneven and remarkably dull, and the story lacks a compelling or dramatically satisfying arc. What is left is a big budget after school special film that comes and goes without the least bit of notice. That stars like Emily Blunt and Chris Evans are in this film only makes it all the more perplexing as to how this got made…and why.

Pain Hustlers is set in 2011, in the wake of the first wave of the opioid epidemic when a chill had gone through the pain management industry thanks to America’s waking up to Purdue Pharma’s rapacious greed and criminality. The drug at the center of this movie though is not oxycontin, but rather fentanyl, an opioid even more powerful, and deadly, than oxycontin.

The film tries to walk along a straight razor as it argues that fentanyl is a great drug, but that corporate greed is what causes it to become problematic due to over prescribing. It presents charming rogue pharma salespeople as the real working-class heroes who get screwed (sometimes literally) by the corporate big wigs who ruin the fentanyl utopia these hard-working, hustling salespeople created.

That is a very complicated moral and ethical argument to make, and maybe it’s a worthwhile one, but Pain Hustlers and its director Yates are too low rent artistically (and intellectually) to ever clearly make this argument, or any argument regarding the opioid crisis coherently. Which is a shame as nuance is welcome artistically even in the most seemingly Manichean of circumstances.

In recent years there have been numerous opioid epidemic projects based on non-fiction books that have made it to streaming services. In 2021 there was the miniseries Dopesick on Hulu, and in August of this year the miniseries Painkiller premiered on Netflix. While Dopesick wasn’t great, it was decent enough…but now with Pain Hustlers, Netflix has churned out two straight, similarly titled, really bad opioid themed projects based on books in the span of three months. Not good.

As much as I proselytize and evangelize regarding the horrors of the opioid crisis (which is still ravaging the country) and the villainy of the pharmaceutical industry and the corruption of our government, I simply cannot recommend Pain Hustlers as it isn’t informative, insightful or entertaining.

The truth is that Pain Hustlers is completely and entirely forgettable, so don’t waste your time watching it. I’ve not read the book Pain Hustlers by Evan Hughes, but I can only hope that it is better than the movie…so go read that. Or better yet, go read the books Dopesick by Beth Macy, Painkiller by Barry Meier, American Overdose by Chris McGreal and Dreamland by Sam Quinones. What you discover in those books about our country and the moral and ethical corruption of our vile ruling class, will change the way you look at our world and help you to understand that those who rule and own us, passionately despise us and actively want to do us great harm.

 Follow me on Twitter: @MPMActingCo

©2023

The Irishman: A Review

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SEE IT.

The Irishman, written by Steve Zaillian (based on the book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt) and directed by Martin Scorsese, is the alleged true story of Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a truck driver out of Philadelphia who becomes a trusted member of the Italian mafia. The film stars Robert DeNiro as Sheeran, with supporting turns from Al Pacino and Joe Pesci.

Martin Scorsese is one of the true masters of American cinema, and so when he releases a new film cinephiles take notice. Scorsese’s newest project, The Irishman, is a Netflix film, which means it will have a very limited release in theatres in November before it settles in for the long haul on the streaming service at the end of the month.

Being the obnoxious purist that I am, I wanted to catch The Irishman in theatres so I decided to see the first show at 10:45 on Tuesday morning. I assumed the theatre would be just how I like it…sparsely populated. I mean who, besides a loser like me, goes to a movie on a Tuesday morning? Well…apparently there are a lot of losers in Los Angeles. I was stunned to see that my screening of The Irishman was jam-packed and nearly sold out, with only the first two rows of the theatre with empty seats. The film is supposedly only playing in two theatres here in Los Angeles, and luckily for me one of the two is my regular hang out. My screening was bursting with an interesting cross-section of people, from hipsters to the elderly to elderly hipsters.

What surprised me the most about such a large crowd was that the film runs three hours and thirty minutes, which makes it a prime candidate to watch in the comfort of your home where you can hit the pause button to take bathroom breaks and not miss any of the action. Such is the draw of Scorsese that audiences would put their bladders to the test and shell out money to see a film they could essentially see for free with unlimited bathroom breaks just a few weeks from now.

The Irishman is not so much a genre defining film as it is a genre closing film. Like Clint Eastwood’s eloquent tombstone on the grave of the western, Unforgiven, Scorsese gives us the mob movie that makes mob movies dramatically obsolete with The Irishman. Both Unforgiven and The Irishman burst the archetype and myth that animate them and replace it with the awkward, unwieldy and soul-crushing reality of the consequences of that myth.

Unlike its energetic and exuberant predecessor Goodfellas,The Irishman is a melancholy meditation, a profound existential prayer whispered into the abyss. Scorsese’s makeshift mob trilogy, which began with Goodfellas and continued with Casino, finds its weighty final chapter with the contemplative epic The Irishman, and reveals an introspective auteur coming to grips with mortality. The Irishman is a film obsessed with mortality, as death looms over every scene like an ominous storm cloud containing the relentlessly inevitable deluge of both physical and spiritual destruction and disintegration.

In Goodfellas and Casino, Scorsese sees the mob world as morally corrupt, but does so through a nostalgic lens…these guys may be bad but they are “good guys”, good-fellas. In The Irishman, as physical action turns to spiritual consequences, nostalgia is replaced with a plaintive reflection, so profound as to be akin to a sacramental confession.

The performances in The Irishman magnificently give life to Scorsese’s artistic contemplation, with Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci doing some of their very best work, and easily the best work of the last three decades of their careers.

DeNiro, with the assistance of a “de-aging” special effects technology, plays Frank Sheeran from his young adulthood into old age. DeNiro has not been this engaged, this sharp or this magnetic for a quarter of a century. DeNiro and Scorsese give Frank time and space, with which he is able to be still and contemplate his choices both in the moment and in hindsight. DeNiro sublimely fills these moments with a consequential aching, and his character with an acutely unconscious wound that gives Sheeran a complexity and profundity he is unable to grasp. DeNiro is now 76 and this performance may very well be his last hurrah as an actor, and it is a fitting monument to his colossal talent and extraordinary career.

Al Pacino has a supporting role and is absolutely fantastic. Caustically funny and desperately combustible, Pacino’s character (I won’t tell you his name so as not to spoil it) is a force of nature. Pacino imbues his character with a compulsion for control and a pulsating pride that make a toxic combination and undeniably dynamic viewing.

Joe Pesci is sublimely superb as the restrained and deliberate mob boss, Russ Buffalino. Pesci made his name playing frantically unhinged characters, but in The Irishman he shows off his mastery of craft. Pesci’s Buffalino is quiet and still, and yet because he fills his stillness and silence with an undeniable intentionality, he radiates an unnerving power. Pesci rightfully won the Best Supporting Actor for his work in Goodfellas, but his performance in The Irishman, while not as showy, is even better, as it is as layered and complex a piece of acting as you’ll find.

The de-aging technology used on DeNiro, Pacino and Pesci can be a little disorienting at first, and it takes some getting used to, but after the first few minutes you never even think of it. The one thing that is sort of odd about it is that the technology only de-ages their faces and not their bodies. So when a young and fresh faced DeNiro is beating the crap out of a guy on a sidewalk, he moves like a 76 year old man…like he is underwater…which is very strange to see.

The Irishman is epic is scope and scale, and it covers some 40 or 50 years of time. As previously stated, the film has a run time of three hours and thirty minutes, and I can tell you that the film is so engrossing and captivating, that not once during that three hours and thirty minutes did I mentally or physically check out. The same was true of the other people in my screening as bathroom breaks were minimal and phone checking was non-existent…which is extremely rare nowadays.

The long running time is a good sign because it means that this is Scorsese’s film, untouched by the filthy hands of studio execs or money people. Piece of Shit Hall of Famer Harvey Weinstein once famously demanded that Scorsese cut 45 minutes off of Gangs of New York and the film was immensely harmed by those cuts. The same is true of Silence, which Paramount demanded be cut for time, and also seriously suffered because of it. When studios meddle they always and every time fuck it up, this is why Netflix matters, because unlike other studios they don’t meddle and they don’t chase the short-end money of box office bravado, they let artists be artists.

Netflix is important too because without them The Irishman never gets made. The other studios passed on the film and its hefty price tag of $160 million, and so Netflix was the studio of last resort. Scorsese would no doubt prefer to have a long theatrical run with his film, but I bet he is quite pleased he made the trade-off of reduced theatrical run in exchange for Netflix letting him make the movie he wanted to make. Just more proof that the studios and theatres are fucked…they have no vision and no balls…and they will deservedly go down in flames.

The real question regarding The Irishman is not whether you should see it, you obviously should as it is one of the very best films of the year, but where you should see it. For cinephiles, I do recommend you make the effort to see it in the theatre, as it is beautifully shot by Rodrigo Prieto, Scorsese’s cinematographer on The Wolf of Wall Street and Silence, with a subdued color palette, exquisite framing and deliriously gorgeous but subtle cameras movement. The film is also expertly edited by Thelma Schoonmakert who seamlessly keeps the film’s dramatic pacing on target while also allowing it to breathe. But for regular folks who are not as concerned about those things as I am…I think they can avoid the theatrical gauntlet and wait until The Irishman hits Netflix at the end of November and watch the movie at their leisure with the pause button at the ready when nature calls.

The Irishman is a powerful film that is the very best work of the second half of Scorsese’s career. While it is difficult to predict what the always erratic Academy Awards will do, I think it is a safe bet to say that The Irishman will at least garner a plethora of nominations. I think it will be nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor (both Pesci and Pacino), Best Cinematography (Rodrigo Prieto), and Best Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker). In my opinion the film is certainly worthy of all of those awards…but there are other worthy films this year too, so we will see.

In conclusion, I have not revealed much about The Irishman’s plot or characters because I knew little about them when I saw the film and thought that enhanced my viewing experience. I have a lot of thoughts on the movie, its politics (oh boy do I have thoughts!!), its sub-text and its symbolism, but I will hold off on sharing those thoughts for now because they are potential spoilers. Once I have seen the film again and it is running on Netflix, I’ll write more in depth about it.

The bottom line regarding The Irishman is this…it is a phenomenal film well worth the time commitment to see. If you have the time and the bladder control, see it in a theatre, if not wait until you can watch it at home come November 27. Regardless of when or where you see it, see it, and enjoy one of the greatest film makers of all time as he wrestles with his legacy and his mortality.

©2019

Martin Scorsese - Top Five Films

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes 57 seconds

Despite an abysmal winter, spring and most of the summer, 2019 is actually shaping up to be a good year for cinema. The first ray of sunshine came in the form of Quentin Tarantino’s wish fulfillment ode to Los Angeles, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. Then the cultural hurricane known as Joker came along and sent the woke brigade and the impotent cuckolds in the establishment media into a full blown panic before most ever even saw it. When the Joker finally made landfall it was an insightful and electrifying artistic nuclear explosion at the center of the comic book genre that has dominated the box office and the culture wars.

Now that Halloween has come and gone, cinematic master Martin Scorsese has a new film, The Irishman, hitting theatres, and shortly thereafter hitting Netflix, that is generating massive Oscar buzz. This will be followed by another enigmatic auteur, Terrence Malick, who has a new film, A Hidden Life, coming out this December.

With Tarantino, Joaquin Phoenix, Martin Scorsese and Terrence Malick in the mix, it is a good time time be a cinephile…and since Scorsese’s new film came out last Friday and I haven’t seen it yet, it is also a good time for me to rank his top five films.

Scorsese is the most important film maker of his generation and maybe the most important American film maker of all time. Unlike Spielberg and his popcorn movies, Scorsese hasn’t padded his wallet with his work but instead advanced the art of cinema. Nearly every single film and filmmaker of note over the last 40 years has used Scorsese’s artistic palette to paint their own works. His use of dynamic camera movement, popular music and unorthodox storytelling structures and styles have become requisite and foundational film making skills. Scorsese didn’t invent cinema, but he did invent a new style of it that did not exist prior to his rise to prominence in the 1970’s, and that is why he is the most unique of auteurs.

Scorsese’s filmography can be split in two, with 1997’s Kundun being the end of the first half of his film making career, and 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead being the beginning of the latter part of his career. The first half of his career is staggeringly impressive, as he jumped genres with ease. Films as diverse as the gritty Taxi Driver, the musical New York, New York, the controversial The Last Temptation of Christ, the remake of Cape Fear, the enigmatic sequel to The Hustler, The Color of Money, and his biography of the Dalai Lama, Kundun, showcase Scorsese’s cinematic versatility.

The second half of his career has shown Scorsese to have lost a few miles per hour off his fastball and to have been brow beaten by the studios into making more mainstream fare. 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead was awful, most notably because Scorsese fell under the then popular spell of acting charlatan Nicholas Cage. Gangs of New York had similarly bad casting decisions, such as Cameron Diaz, no doubt encouraged by meddling money people…like Harvey Weinstein, who also took a gigantic shit on Scorsese’s vision of the film by demanding he cut 45 minutes off the running time. Other notable films from this period are The Aviator, Shutter Island and Hugo, all of which are less Scorsese films than they are studio films made by Scorsese.

Scorsese’s lone Academy Award win for Best Director came during this period with the film The Departed. The Departed is an ok movie, but it definitely feels more like a knock-off of a Scorsese film than an actual Scorsese film. It also feels like it could have been directed by anybody, which is more an indictment of the movie than and endorsement of the movie making.

The first half of Scorsese’s career is highlighted by his frequent collaborations with Robert DeNiro, and the second half by his frequent collaborations with Leonardo DiCaprio. If you’re looking for any greater piece of evidence that Scorsese is no longer at his peak, look no further than that fact. DiCaprio is a fine actor, but he is no Robert DeNiro, as DeNiro in his heyday was as good an actor as we have ever seen.

That said, Scorsese has made some great films in the second half of his career…as my list will attest…and who knows, maybe The Irishman will be worthy of inclusion. I am definitely looking forward to seeing it.

Now without further delay…onto the the list of Martin Scorsese’s “five” best films!

5C - Wolf of Wall Street (2013) - Wolf of Wall Street sneaks onto the list because it is uproariously funny while also being socially and politically insightful. In the face of the grotesque corruption so evident on Wall Street and in Washington, it was nice to see Scorsese focus his talents on the decadence and depravity that are the soul of American capitalism. It also helps that this is the only time the DiCaprio collaboration works, as Leo does the best work of his career as Jordan Belfort.

5B - Casino (1995) - Casino is an often often overlooked gem in Scorsese’s filmography. The film may have suffered from “Scorsese fatigue” as it appeared to tread on the same “mob” ground his recent masterpiece Goodfellas (1991). Casino is an indulgent masterwork in its own right, as Scorsese tells the story of how the west was won, and lost, by the Italian mafia, who were replaced by the corporate mafia. The film showcases some stellar performances from DeNiro, Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone.

5A - Silence (2016) - Silence is the very best film of the second half of his career…so far. Scorsese has always carried a Catholic cross bearing a tortured Christ on it throughout most of his films, and Silence is a tantalizing glimpse at the muse that has haunted Scorsese his entire artistic life. Silence is an ambitious film, and it doesn’t quite live up to its ambitions, but it still is great. One thing that I felt hampered the film was that it also was the victim of cuts for time, which is frustrating as Silence is a rare film in that it runs 160 minutes but deserved, and needed, to run at least another 45 minutes. Secondly, Scorsese once again falls for artistic fool’s gold by casting this generations Nicholas Cage, the mystifyinly popular Adam Driver.

4. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)- Speaking of Scorsese’s Catholicism…The Last Temptation of Christ hit theatres while I was attending Catholic high school, and you would’ve thought that Satan himself had put the movie out. Students were read a statement by the diocese imploring us not to see the movie because it was blasphemous and viewing it would guarantee a one-way trip to eternal damnation. Obviously, I responded to this warning by rushing out and seeing the film as quickly as I could…and I am glad I did (and I’m still Catholic!). The Catholic Church’s fear over this film was so absurd as to be laughable, and this is only heightened by the fact that the film is the most spiritually vibrant and resonant depiction of Christ ever captured on film.

3. The Age of Innocence (1993) - The Age of Innocence is the most un-Scorsese of Scorsese films, as it tackles romantic intrigue among the austere world of Edith Wharton’s 1870’s New York. In many ways The Age of Innocence is a massive cinematic flex by Scorsese as he shows off his directorial versatility and exquisite film making skill. While the casting of Winona Ryder and Michelle Pfeiffer were hurdles to overcome, Scorsese does so and in magnificent fashion as The Age of Innocence is an exercise in dramatic and cinematic precision.

2. The King of Comedy (1982)- The King of Comedy is a piece of cinematic gold that accurately and insightfully diagnoses America’s star-fueled, delusional culture. The film is highlighted by Robert DeNiro, who gives an unnervingly committed and forceful performance as Rupert Pupkin, the celebrity obsessed comic wannabe who tries to get his big break by any means necessary.

The King of Comedy crackles because Scorsese creates a palpable sense of claustrophobic desperation that permeates every scene in the movie. The film is genuinely funny but uncomfortably unsettling and undeniably brilliant.

1C - Raging Bull (1980) - The top three films here could be in any order as all of them are undeniable masterpieces and the height of cinematic achievement. Raging Bull, the black and white look at former Middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, is a tour-de-force from not only the film’s star Robert DeNiro, who won a Best Actor Oscar, but from Martin Scorsese, who brings all of his cinematic skills to bear on the most cinematic of sports, boxing.

Scorsese uses LaMotta’s story to explore the meaning of masculinity, its incessant fragility and its inherent volatility. While Scorsese does masterful work bringing LaMotta’s battles inside the ring to exquisite life, his most brilliant film making achievement is in illuminating LaMotta’s most imposing fight, the one raging inside of himself.

1B - Taxi Driver - Taxi Driver once again shows both Scorsese and DeNiro at the very top of their game. The film perfectly captures the madness of New York City in the 1970’s, and the spiraling madness of a delusional loner who is the modern day everyman.

Scorsese’s camera rides along a taxi cab as it ventures through the gritty streets and bares witness to the sick and venal society that produces pimps, whores and politicians, and we get to know Travis Bickle, who is the rain that will wash these filthy streets clean.

A simply astonishing film in every respect. Not just one of Scorsese’s greatest films, but one of the greatest films of all-time.

1A - Goodfellas - Goodfellas is a not only a monumental cinematic achievement, it is also a fantastically entertaining and eminently rewatchable masterpiece. Over the last thirty years, whenever I have stumbled across Goodfellas playing on cable, I will always and everytime stop and watch whatever scene is on, and 9 times out of 10, will end up watching the rest of the movie.

A terrific cast that boasts superb performances from Robert DeNiro, Joe Pesci, Ray Liotta and Lorraine Bracco, turns this film about New York gangsters, into a familiar and familial tale that everyone can relate to in one way or another. The New York of Goodfellas, is the New York of my youth, and those populating that world are my Irish family…all of them. In my family there’s a Paulie, a Henry, a Jimmy and everyone knows a Tommy. These guys are my uncles and their friends and cousins, and their wives are my aunts. Watching Goodfellas is like watching a home movie for me.

The film teems with iconic scenes and sequences, from entering the Copa to the “Layla” dead bodies sequence to “hoof” to “go get your shine box” to “what do you want fucko?” to “funny how? I mean, funny like a clown? I amuse you?” I can’t get enough of Goodfellas, as I’ve probably seen the movie at least 100 times, and I’ve discovered something new every time I’ve seen it.

Scorsese has made many masterpieces, but Goodfellas is his most entertaining masterpiece, and is a testament and monument to his greatness.

More proof of Scorsese’s genius is that I had many, many films that I love sit just on the outside of my top “five”…such as Mean Streets, The Color of Money, Cape Fear and Kundun, and they stand up to most other makers very best work.

And thus concludes my Scorsese top “five”…which is really a top nine, because Scorsese, the consummate rule breaking director, deserves a list that breaks the rules. So go forth and watch as much Scorsese as you can, and let’s hope that The Irishmen lives up to the hype!

©2019