I shouldn't be able to get away with calling Gangs of New York and The Aviator overly ambitious projects, for if Martin Scorsese can't be ambitious about making a movie, then who can? Nevertheless, both films were overlong; stuffed with good ideas and at least one amazing performance, but not as great as the sum of their parts. So while… read more!

This long-awaited epic – Scorsese's 30-year quest to bring the story to the screen is well-known – arrives a year behind schedule (thanks to Miramax's post-9/11 squeamishness), but is none the worse for it. A bloody, baroque sprawl of a film, Gangs of New York examines a heretofore little-explored chapter in New York history: the early 1860s, where tensions between… read more!

Those even slightly familiar with the life of Martin Scorsese know about his fabled childhood, where little asthmatic Marty became enthralled by the movies, as he was too sickly to play outside with the neighborhood kids. Only Scorsese knows how true this legend exactly is, but the image of him forlornly staring out of his Hell's Kitchen window at the… read more!

As cinema's new normal continues to settle in, with top-shelf Oscar contenders now being produced by streaming services, Martin Scorsese's three hour, thirty minute crime epic The Irishman is given a mere monthlong theatrical run before it lands at its permanent home on Netflix, the studio that financed it. The film is based on Charles Brandt's nonfiction book I Heard… read more!

Bumped from its original release date of October 2009 (earlier that year, the film's advance pedigree may have been one of the reasons why the Academy optimistically increased its number of Best Picture nominees from five to ten), Scorsese's latest is a freakshow thriller set in 1954 where an obviously disturbed young Federal Marshall (Leonardo DiCaprio) is sent to a… read more!

There are lots of reasons why I should not have liked The Wolf of Wall Street. For starters, it's three hours long. And as it's an anecdote-heavy memoir of debauched Wall Street swindler Jordan Belfort that plays out over the course of ten years, there's no strong dramatic storyline. It's filled with lengthy scenes of actors screwing around, yelling a lot… read more!