Martin Scorsese

Bringing Out the Dead

Bringing Out the Dead (1999) | Review by Stanley Kauffmann

A chief trouble with Martin Scorsese’s new film is that it has to strain to be a Scorsese film. Certain graphic qualities have marked most of his work, and as with any director of personality and style, those qualities had become as natural to him as breathing. But in Bringing Out the Dead, the formerly natural seems forced, redemptive, almost salvaging.

The King of Comedy – Review by Stanley Kauffmann

The picture is virtually bare of Scorsese style, such touches, heavy or helpful, as the opening manhole shot of Taxi Driver or the opening prize-ring sequence of Raging Bull. I saw nothing in The King of Comedy that couldn’t have been done by any competent director. Cinematically, it’s flavorless.

Raging Bull (1980) De Niro and Scorsese on set

Raging Bull – Review by Stanley Kauffmann

Seeing Martin Scorsese’s new film is like visiting a human zoo. That’s certainly not to say that it’s dull: good zoos are not dull. But the life we watch is stripped to elemental drives, with just enough decor of complexity—especially the heraldry of Catholicism —to underscore how elemental it basically is.

IMAGISM AND MARTIN SCORSESE: IMAGES SUSPENDED AND EXTENDED – by George P. Castellitto

Scorsese’s technique of “freezing” objects generates a particular method of cinematic exposition in which characters and objects are portrayed in a moment between movement and non-movement; this “moment” is the bridge between potential behavior and stasis. The “thing” is frozen or suspended on the screen, and the possibility of either stasis or experience emerges from this momentary suspension.

TAXI DRIVER (1976) – Review by Michael Dempsey [Film Quarterly]

In Taxi Driver, New York City is a steaming, polluted cesspool and Travis Bickle’s cab a drifting bathysphere from which he can peer at the “garbage and trash” which obsess him: whores, pimps, junkies, wandering maniacs, maggotty streets, random violence.

Mean Streets: Everyday Inferno – Review by Pauline Kael

Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets is a true original of our period, a triumph of personal filmmaking. It has its own hallucinatory look; the characters live in the darkness of bars, with lighting and color just this side of lurid. It has its own unsettling, episodic rhythm and a high-charged emo­tional range that is dizzyingly sensual.