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.

Casino Is More Than Just Another Scorsese Gangster Movie

While I've already penned up some thoughts on Martin Scorsese's Casino over on TheSpool as part of the website's Martin Scorsese Month (hey, that's promotion!), there's so much to say about this motion picture that my response to it cannot be contained to just one article. Over here on Land of the Nerds, let's turn our gaze back to Casino, a movie that was widely declared at the time of its release to be merely the reheated leftover pizza to Goodfellas' fresh-out-of-the-wooden-oven pizza. True, Casino is no Goodfellas, but then, what is? Goodfellas is a massively high bar to clear, and even other Scorsese gangster movies shouldn't be held exclusively to measuring up to that one-of-a-kind masterpiece.

Goodfellas Is A 145 Minute Reminder Of Why Martin Scorsese Is A Cinematic Legend

There was this odd phenomenon when The Wolf Of Wall Street came out three years ago regarding many commentators feeling that the movie was explicitly endorsing the various nasty deeds its lead character commits. Art is subjective and all that, so if that's your takeaway from the film, that's fair. Personally though, I'd say The Wolf Of Wall Street very much makes it clear that Jordan Belfort is a very bad man, one that the movie wants you to gawk at while seeing how much this real-life guy was able to get away with in his time of swindling and debauchery. Scorsese's whole point with that 2013 effort is for the viewer to come away with how delusional Belfort was as a human being; despite all the Quaallades and obvious wrongdoings he was committing, he still saw himself as untouchable, above the common world.