The Irishman Is Like No Other Gangster Movie Scorsese Has Ever Made

Early on in The Irishman, the film's titular lead character, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), recounts a story about his time serving in World War II where he held two enemy soldiers at gunpoint while they dug their own graves. Sheeran, while telling this tale, puzzles over why the two soldiers were doing this task. "Did they think that, if they did a good enough job, they would be let go?" he ponders. Whatever drove them to dig those graves, it really didn't matter in the end, they ended up as corpses in the ground. Such a tale ends up being a parallel for the overarching story of Martin Scorsese's epic crime saga The Irishman, which is all about gangsters like Sheeran digging their own graves while ignoring the inevitable doom that awaits them.

The Last Temptation of Christ's Compelling Humanity Makes It One of the Best Scorsese Movies

   

Martin Scorsese is known for his gangster movies and for good reason, he's made one of the all-time great gangster movies with Goodfellas. But that's not all he's delivered as a filmmaker, in fact, looking over his filmography, one is impressed with the variety of genres and aesthetics he's explored. The dude's dabbled in musicals, screwball comedies, family movies, Scorsese's love for cinema has been translated into him trying his hand at so many different avenues of creative cinematic expression. Such exploration has also led him to make religious-minded affair like Silence or The Last Temptation of Christ that stand out to me, as a Christian, as actually thoughtful Christan-based cinema, a perfect counter to all of that dreadful PureFlix drivel.

After Hours Is A Rapid-Fire Dark Comedy Gem

Typically, Martin Scorsese movies are known for their expansive nature. They follow gangsters for numerous years of their lives, they follow Jesus Christ all the way to a theoretical life hinging on him never getting crucified or they follow the lead character of Silence as he grapples with his personal religious calling over decades. This means After Hours is an intriguing anomaly in his filmography, it takes place over the course of a single night. This is a far leaner Scorsese motion picture all about cramming as much as possible into a small amount of time, which means both the protagonist and camera are constantly being whipped across the screen to some new sight that's bound to fascinate the audience.

Under the Silver Lake Is The Poor Man's Inherent Vice

Under the Silver Lake is a movie all about hidden messages, but none of those messages are as hiden as the movie itself, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last May before a prospective June 2018 release. But then the film reviewed mixed marks at the festival and its distributor, A24, delayed it to December 7, 2018. That day came and went without a trace of Under the Silver Lake. What happened? Was Under the Silver Lake doomed to just sit on a shelf somewhere? Then the film got a brief (read: three day long) theatrical run in April 2019 before dropping unceremoniously on Amazon Streaming last week. It's been a long journey for Under the Silver Lake and for some, this highly unusual motion picture will have been more than worth the wait. For me, it turned out to be a movie that would have been underwhelming even if I had been waiting just five minutes for it to arrive.

Writer/Director Paul Schrader Delivers Something Equally Bleak And Unforgettable With First Reformed

If you were to do a film festival dedicated solely to films that serve as morose meditations on man's relationship with God, you'd have plenty of high-quality options to choose from. Ordet would certainly be an option, ditto for Au Hasard Balthazar. If you're looking for modern-day examples, well, let's totally throw Noah and Silence in the line-up too, those two movies never get enough love. Another recent movie that totally should be included in this theoretical film festival hails from director Paul Schrader and is entitled First Reformed. If you're wondering if First Reformed is bleak enough to join the likes of Au Hasard Balthazar, trust me, it most certainly is.

Come Sunday Isn't An Enlightening As It Could Have Been

Going against the norm is always a risk in typical societies and that's especially true when one is trying to buck traditional theological norms. As a practicing Christian in Texas, I can tell you first hand that religious communities can be heavily wary, at best, to the prospect of new practices that upend traditional customs. Even recognizing how daunting the process is, it can be important for us as individuals to challenge the status quo, something preacher Carlton Pearson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), the main character of the new Joshua Marston directed drama Come Sunday, is very much reminded of after he causes quite the stir in declaring that Hell does not exist in one of his Sunday morning sermons.

And No One Dared Disturb The Sound Of Silence

As a Christian, my biggest complaint with so-called faith-based Christian movies like God's Not Dead is...well, I don't just have one complaint with these atrocious movies, the worst of the bunch are pretty much top-to-bottom disasters. But in terms of complaints directly connected to my faith, these films claim to try to explore real-world struggles of Christianity but don't seem to exist in the real world. In an effort to be as squeaky-clean as possible, actual topics of hardship are rarely explored in these Christian films. More adult concepts are off-limits except for rare sequences like Kirk Cameron bashing in his porn-riddled computer in Fireproof and any of the tepid dramatic situations are easily resolved in a tidy little bow.