Despite what you may have heard from some breathless movie critics, 2023 was a year of further decline for American cinema. But there was a promising inflection point: the year marked a moment when the seemingly unstoppable empire of Marvel began its long-overdue decline even as Marvel’s Enemy Number One, Martin Scorsese, ended the year with the aura of artistic triumph. His long-in-the-making adaptation of New Yorker writer David Grann’s true-crime saga, Killers of the Flower Moon, is the best movie he’s ever made. The extreme thoroughness, subtlety, and thought invested in this project indicate that, as Scorsese moves into his Joe Biden years, he has evolved into a more nuanced, more complex film artist.
Recently, and for the first time in a while, I rewatched Taxi Driver (1976), which…
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Cinema Scope (Digital) - 1 Issue, Issue 97 - Winter 2024