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 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.
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.
Robert De Niro’s Rupert Pupkin is Jake La Motta without his fists. In Raging Bull, De Niro and Scorsese had things boiled down, so that Jake’s entire character was the chip on his shoulder. This time there’s no chip.
An old man recalls his time painting houses for his friend, Jimmy Hoffa, through the 1950-70s.
By far his most ambitious film to date technically and in the scope of its references, Taxi Driver shows Scorsese’s urgency working at full throttle—to the film’s considerable success and less considerable failure.
Pauline Kael reviews ‘New York Stories’, the 1989 anthology film consisting of three shorts with the central theme being New York City. Episodes directed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Woody Allen.
by Gavin Smith Gavin Smith: What was it that drew you to the GoodFellas material? Martin Scorsese: I read a review of the book; basically
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.
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.
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.
Novelist of ‘Nothing Natural’, Jenny Diski, watches a video of the first ‘Cape Fear’ and the Scorsese remake – and compares them
The movie is a disgrace: an ugly, incoherent, dishonest piece of work. The original picture, directed by a skillful journeyman, J. Lee Thompson, is memorable without being especially artful.
J. Hoberman’s review of “Cape Fear” (1991) by Martin Scorsese
by Pauline Kael Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas has a lift. It’s like Raging Bull, except that it’s not domineering. It’s like Raging Bull made in a
This interview took place in Paris during the night of February 11-12, 1981. A translation of “Nuit blanche et chambre noire” from Positif, April 1981.
No other film has ever dramatized urban indifference so powerfully; at first, here, it’s horrifyingly funny, and then just horrifying.
Martin Scorsese interview with Guy Flatley for ‘The New York Times’, December 1973
Religious Pulp, or the Incredible Hulk by Pauline Kael As Jake la Motta, the former middleweight boxing champ, in Raging Bull, Robert De Niro wears
What has drawn Scorsese to mix a mafia story with a Biblical epic? The director explains