Academics are taught to write with a dispassionate yet highly detailed style for their scholarly treatises. That is the approach that Martin Scorsese has taken with SILENCE, his philosophically dense and immaculately rendered film of Shusaku Endo’s book of the same name. The result is a maddening film more to be admired than enjoyed as… Read More »
SHUTTER ISLAND
It’s no great trick to work out the twist in SHUTTER ISLAND, nor is having done so any great hindrance to enjoying this latest collaboration between Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, the clues judiciously scattered throughout the film all but demand that the audience figure out that one small piece of the puzzle… Read More »
GANGS OF NEW YORK
Martin Scorseses much anticipated, long delayed GANGS OF NEW YORK has finally arrived, and an ambitious, magnificent mess it is. Scorseses visual style, his love for detail as a rich setting for his story, is not to be faulted, but the story itself is a sprawling thing that doesnt so much advance during its 168-minute… Read More »
THE AVIATOR
Crash and burn is a painfully apt metaphor for the life of Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio) as told in Martin Scorseses THE AVIATOR. We even see two such events in the course of its almost three hours of running time. Unlike the tidier myth of Icarus, though, Hughes story is more than just genius meeting… Read More »
THE DEPARTED
With THE DEPARTED, Martin Scorsese has taken a good film, the Hong Kong minor classic INFERNAL AFFAIRS, and remade it into a movie that is as bloated as it is bland. Gone is the dramatic tension of a slick action flick, gone is the suspenseful psychological subtext that pondered the nature of identity, subsumed into… Read More »