Cinephiles love debates. Their corner of the Internet — Film Twitter, or “Film X,” I guess, and Letterboxd — is full of them, including the debate to rule them all: Who is the best director of all time? Answers vary, and age plays a big part. Older cineasts often say Alfred Hitchcock or Akira Kurosawa. Younger film-lovers often say Quentin Tarantino or Christopher Nolan. There are, of course, others: David Lynch or, my favorite, Paul Thomas Anderson.
Each is a great filmmaker, but your answer is idiosyncratic, reflective of your personal strain of style and tone. But, whether you are into big-budget spectacle, muted melodrama or something in-between, we can all agree on one name: Martin Scorsese.
He is, in many ways, the “grandfather” of modern moviemaking; each of his films is an event. However, the end of his legendary filmography is getting closer and closer.
And he knows it. In a recent interview with GQ, he reflected on the third act of his career — and life.
He only has, at best, a handful of films left in him. And it has been four years since “The Irishman,” his — latest — gangster epic, a sprawling three-and-a-half-hour parable of grief, longing and regret: a film synonymous with his age-induced anxiety.
I will be honest. I teared up reading his GQ interview, and I do not even have a meaningful connection to him or his work. Of course, he is one of the all-time greats. But his “best” movies came out decades before I was born, and I was not old enough to see “The Departed” or “The Wolf of Wall Street” in theaters. I watched “The Irishman” “opening weekend,” but it was a Netflix movie; realistically, you could only see it in theaters if you lived in New York or Los Angeles.
As such, I was thrilled when I read that his latest, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” an Apple TV+ film, was getting a theatrical release — a wide theatrical release. Yes, if you can believe it, even the Milledgeville AMC is playing it.
The film follows a husband, his wife and his uncle after several members of the Osage Nation are murdered. The less said about the plot, the better.
Getting to see my first in-theaters Scorsese movie with two of my best friends was an experience I will never forget.
If I am being honest, I think I need to see it again before I can try to write about it intelligently. And I am already planning on it. It is big — and not just in terms of Scorsese’s career; it is a three-and-a-half-hour crime film.
But I will say, it was the fastest three and a half hours of my life. Scorsese’s attention to detail. ability to pace and tease out a sprawling murder mystery, is jaw-dropping, mesmerizing. The performances he gets from Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro — and Lily Gladstone, especially — are, by far, three of the best of the year, if not the decade.
At the beginning of the semester, I wrote a piece about my five favorite movies of the summer. In it, I gave “Oppenheimer” the top spot — of the summer, but also the year. And I am not a Christopher Nolan fan. But a lot of things have changed. I have seen “Barbie” two more times; Wes Anderson put out a series of a shorts on Netflix; “Asteroid City” has risen in my rankings. And, on a rewatch, “Killers of the Flower Moon” might make a claim for the throne.
If you can, please do yourself a favor and go see “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It might be the crowning achievement of the year — and one of the last Scorsese movies we get, if not, God forbid, the last. Cherish it. Relish it. I cannot wait to see it again — and write about it at length.
