In the half-century since he got his start in the heyday of the New Hollywood movement, Martin Scorsese has earned a reputation as arguably the greatest living filmmaker. After starting off the 1980s with one of his finest movies, Goodfellas.
The rest of the ‘90s, however, were a mixed bag for the legendary director. His Casino was criticized for emulating the Goodfellas formula a little too closely.
Bringing Out The Dead (1999) – 6.8
Scorsese’s last (and, according to IMDb, worst) film of the ‘90s, Bringing Out the Dead, is like Nicolas Cage plays a disturbed paramedic who’s essentially Travis Bickle with more medical training. Like Travis, he starts losing his sanity as he drives around New York City in a series of long, grueling night shifts – it’s just that, in this late-night line of work, lives are at stake.
Based on the novel of the same name by Joe Connelly, Bringing Out the Dead was scripted by Taxi Driver’s Paul Schrader. Sadly, the movie was a box office bomb, only managing to recoup half of its production budget. It received mixed reviews from critics; some panned it, while others praised it (legendary reviewer Roger Ebert gave it a perfect four-star rating).
Kundun (1997) – 7.0
Scorsese’s biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama, Kundun, was met with the usual controversy for acknowledging the existence of Tibet, but it was also met with polarized reviews from critics. Reviewers praised Scorsese’s beautiful cinematography and mesmerizing music as usual, but the thesis of the movie was called into question.
Kundun was criticized for its glamorous portrayal of its subject. Instead of exploring the dark side of Tenzin Gyatso like he did with his previous biopic subjects (Jake LaMotta, Howard Hughes, even Jesus Christ), Scorsese presented the Dalai Lama as a clear-cut hero, whitewashing any morally ambiguous aspects of his life story.
The Age Of Innocence (1993) – 7.2
Scorsese dedicated The Age of Innocence to his father, Luciano Charles Scorsese, who died a month before the movie was released. Scorsese’s dad has a cameo appearance in the film alongside his wife, Catherine Scorsese, the director’s mother. Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic of the same name by Edith Wharton, this romantic drama marked one of Scorsese’s biggest tonal departures.
Scorsese remains faithful to the tragicomic tone of Wharton’s prose and the film is anchored by a trio of fantastic performances by Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder, and Michelle Pfeiffer.
Cape Fear (1991) – 7.3
After reshaping the cinematic landscape with Goodfellas, Scorsese took a deep dive into film history and remade J. Lee Thompson’s classic 1962 thriller Cape Fear. Telling the story of a sadistic ex-convict who stalks the family of the prosecutor that put him behind bars, Cape Fear is a timeless Hitchcockian thriller tapping into universal fears.
Scorsese’s 1991 remake – as tense and tautly constructed as the original ‘60s classic – proved that this story was just as terrifying three decades later (and it’s just as terrifying another three decades later). Nick Nolte replaces Gregory Peck as the lawyer, Sam Bowden, while Robert De Niro replaces Robert Mitchum as the convict, Max Cady.
Casino (1995) – 8.2
Scorsese’s second gangster opus of the 1990s, Casino, was criticized for rehashing the Goodfellas formula. Like Goodfellas, Casino is a sprawling epic about organized crime with voiceover narration, rapid nonlinear editing, and a bunch of classic needle-drops on the soundtrack.
Goodfellas’ Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci star as feuding mafiosos whose stories end in individual tragedies. Casino might just rehash Scorsese’s approach to Goodfellas, but it rehashes it in spectacular style and explores a different illicit business in a different locale: the gambling racket in Las Vegas.
Goodfellas (1990) – 8.7
Goodfellas isn’t just Scorsese’s highest-rated movie; it’s one of the highest-rated movies of all time on IMDb. Many Scorsese fans consider Goodfellas, his biopic of low-level gangster-turned-cocaine trafficker Henry Hill, to be the peak of his filmmaking career. In its opening sequence, Goodfellas hits the audience like a speeding bullet and maintains that momentum with energetic editing, nonlinear storytelling, and fast-paced montages set to rapid-fire voiceover narration.
Henry is a classic Scorsese antihero. He’s a deeply flawed Italian-American mobster with one sympathetic quality – his inability to stomach the dirty work that goes along with the criminal lifestyle – and countless unsympathetic qualities. He’s full of rage, he turns to violence at the drop of a dime, and he’s abrasive and abusive, both as a husband and as a father. Ray Liotta gives the performance of a lifetime as a weak-minded, coke-frazzled mafioso.
The gangster movie genre is the one that Scorsese will always be most closely associated with, but Scorsese never sets out to glamorize mafia life. From The Irishman – and, indeed, Goodfellas – Scorsese’s mob movies are all cautionary tales about the inevitably grim fate that awaits everybody who gets lured in by the glitz and glamor of organized crime.
