This five-parter by Rebecca Miller is essential viewing for any Martin Scorsese fan – and for anybody who wants to understand the process of movie-making, full stop. Miller has interviewed all the key figures from the director’s life, not just film luminaries but his family, his childhood friends, an ex-wife, the priest who inspired him.With no trace of sycophancy (her husband of 30 years is Scorsese collaborator Daniel Day-Lewis, who contributes astute insights to the mix), Miller moves through the phases of his career chronologically, with a keen eye for using exactly the right footage to Read more ...

This long, fascinating documentary was apparently intended as the centrepiece of last autumn’s BFI celebration of the films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. But Made in England was delayed while Martin Scorsese (executive producer, presenter, and narrator) and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker (Powell’s widow, who also gets a credit as an executive producer) put the finishing touches on Killers of the Flower Moon. It’s a shame in some ways that the expectation of screening Made in England meant that the BFI season didn’t include the excellent BBC Arena Read more ...

Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preferenceSaskia BaronAnatomy of a FallBrokerFallen LeavesJoylandKillers of the Flower MoonOtto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror StoryReturn to SeoulSt OmerScrapperA Thousand and OneThe reason I go to the cinema is mainly to experience other people’s lives and thoughts but also to escape for a few hours from the gerbil wheel of anxiety about the world that spins constantly in my head. 2023 was not a great year for anyone of a fretful disposition, but these were the movies that for a while made me happy and distracted in the dark of the movie Read more ...

Not all Scorsese films are behemoths; Killers of the Flower Moon may last over three hours but After Hours, a low-budget black comedy released in 1983, packs an incredible amount into just 93 minutes.That Scorsese directed the film at all is a happy accident; Joseph Minion’s screenplay was set to be directed by the young Tim Burton, Scorsese opting to take it on after his first attempt to shoot The Last Temptation of Christ had collapsed.Filmed on location in New York, After Hours is dark, oppressive and claustrophobic. An early entry in the “yuppie nightmare” genre (see also Something Wild Read more ...

Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining.Many would cite De Niro’s memorable "you talkin’ to me?" challenge to his own leering, gun-toting reflection in Taxi Driver (1976); others, the same actor’s majestic, slow-motion dance around a boxing ring as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull (1980), or his tragi-comic monologue at the end of that film; others the long tracking shot that follows Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill through the Copacabana in Goodfellas (1990).For me, the indelible scene comes earlier, in Mean Streets Read more ...

At the centre of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, closely adapted from the 2017 non-fiction book by the investigative journalist David Grann, is the true story of how the white former doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprii) was inveigled into slowly poisoning his Native American wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone) for her share of oil wealth in 1920s Oklahoma.At least sixty – possibly hundreds – of Osage were murdered by whites for this reason. Scorsese, with his practiced eye for squalid crime scenes, spiderous psychopaths, and murderous odd-job men, depicts a passel of Read more ...

Martin Scorsese walks onstage to a hero’s welcome, shoulders a little hunched, with a touch of sideways shuffle or hustle, taking acclaim in his stride at 80. He has sold out London’s 2,700-capacity Royal Festival Hall for the BFI’s biggest Screen Talk by far, and the queue for returns stretches into the street, to see a director as big as any star.Fellow director Edgar Wright is here to interview him for 60 minutes about his 27-film career, but barely gets beyond 1980’s Raging Bull in 90. The coked-up motormouth familiar in Scorsese cameos from his backseat rant at Travis Bickle to his Read more ...

At this year’s Oscars Bong Joon Ho brought the audience to its feet in honour of the director whose words had struck a chord with him as a film student. The comment, simple but difficult to adhere to in the cut-throat, risk-averse movie business, was that “the most personal is the most creative”. The director, Martin Scorsese.Of course, Scorsese’s The Irishman was also in contention in the same ceremony, the film a powerful continuation of themes, collaborations and inimitable film language of a career spanning more than 50 years – and proof that the American is still following his Read more ...

Much has been made of Martin Scorsese’s recent dismissal of Marvel films. Putting that debate aside, there’s no escaping the fact that in an era of rapid-fire sequels, with the same ensembles trotted out year after year, there’s far more frisson to be felt when the reunion is after not one or two, but 25 years – and what the filmmakers are seeking to recreate really is movie magic. That’s the case with this reteaming of Scorsese, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, who made a trio of classic films together – Raging Bull, Goodfellas and the last, Casino, in 1995. Read more ...

Time passes slowly and remorselessly in The Irishman. Though its much remarked de-ageing technology lets us glimpse Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) executing German POWs aged 24, none of the gangsters here ever seem young. Everyone is heavy with experience, bloated with spilt blood. The Scorsese gang’s all here for what is surely his last stand in the genre - the returning De Niro, Joe Pesci and Harvey Keitel, and a great Scorsese debut for Pacino. They’re assembled for the story of a gangster’s working life, from first killing to casket.Like Leone’s elegiac, De Niro-starring Once Upon a Time Read more ...

As Martin Scorsese’s new feature film, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, hits Netflix and cinemas, and a new 14 CD boxed set enters the official Bootleg Series, theartsdesk talks exclusively to Scarlet Rivera, the violinist on Desire and the Rolling Thunder Revue tours of 1975 and 1976, about her experiences of encountering, recording and touring with Dylan.I wrote to Scarlet Rivera via her website, expecting only the outside chance of a reply, because few who have worked and spent time with Dylan tend to open up about their experiences in public. I stressed my interest in the Read more ...

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Any More was Ellen Burstyn’s baby. Determined to use her clout after The Exorcist to make a film from a woman’s viewpoint, she offered Robert Getchell’s script to a director who confessed he knew nothing about women. “But,” Martin Scorsese told her, “I’d like to know.”Alice is the odd one out between Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976): Scorsese’s game attempt at both a studio film and a “women’s picture”. But its first five minutes couldn’t be anyone else then: a prologue in a Technicolor-red, Wizard of Oz dream of childhood, where eight-year-old Alice scuffs Read more ...