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Martin Scorsese thinks Marvel films aren’t cinema. “The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes,” he wrote in a New York Times article in 2019, written after a wave of backlash from superhero fans and directors alike. Earlier that year, Marvel’s three-hour blockbuster Avengers: Endgame had garnered over $2.7 billion. For a while it was the highest-grossing film ever made. People turned up to see it in spandex catsuits. You couldn’t move for replica infinity stones. Some theaters, eager to fill the demand, screened the...

While Martin Scorsese is celebrating his latest epic “Killers of the Flower Moon” on the awards circuit, the filmmaker is already teasing what could be his next movie, based on Shūsaku Endō’s book “A Life of Jesus.” (Endō also wrote “Silence,” which Scorsese adapted into the 2016 historical drama starring Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver.) ... “I’m trying to find a new way to make it more accessible and take away the negative onus of what has been associated with organized religion,” Scorsese told the publication. “Right now, ‘religion,’ you say that word and everyone is up in arms because...

Hollywood star (and now father of seven) Robert De Niro is back to slamming Donald Trump in public, calling support for the former president “insane” during a press conference Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival.De Niro also compared Trump to the murderous villain in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. In the new movie, which had its world premiere this weekend at Cannes, De Niro plays William Hale, a cattle baron who was convicted in 1929 of murdering a member of the Osage nation over oil rights.The actor told reporters that evil still exists in the world, and former...

What do you get when Academy Award-winning filmmaker Martin Scorsese decides to executive produce a film on a Jesuit priest’s ministry to “LGBTQ Catholics”? An exquisitely captured propaganda piece, and a glimpse of a distorted, rigid, inflexible “LGBTQ+” culture of unreality. Welcome to the newly released documentary film about Father James Martin, S.J., titled “Building a Bridge,” after Martin’s book of the same name. And welcome to an unquestioningly stubborn world of make-believe in which error is truth, evil is good, sin is virtue, men are women, women are men, men have husbands, women have wives, sodomy is love, and...

Amid controversy over Uma Thurman’s near-fatal “Kill Bill” stunt, a 15-year-old interview with Quentin Tarantino went viral online Monday. The 2003 Howard Stern interview included an almost eight-minute defense of Roman Polanski by the famous director. “He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape. It’s not the same thing. He had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down...it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world,” Tarantino told the shock jock. “You can’t throw the word ‘rape’ around. It’s like throwing the...

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci reunite in new set photos captured during the shooting of The Irishman. Based on a book by Charles Brandt, The Irishman traces the life of real-life reputed mob hitman Frank Sheeran (De Niro), who among other things claimed to have been involved in the 1975 disappearance of Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa, a mystery that to this day remains unsolved (despite outrageous claims like his body being buried under the old Giants Stadium). Al Pacino is set to make his Scorsese debut playing Hoffa. The Irishman marks Martin Scorsese’s return to gangster film...

“Every day, for 40 f%^&% years, one of you has stopped me on the street and said, ‘You talkin’ to me?’” groused Robert De Niro at a recent Q&A at the Tribeca Film festival reuniting the makers of “Taxi Driver”. Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Cybil Shepherd and screenwriter Paul Schrader all swapped anecdotes, and De Niro led the audience in one last rendition of his most famous line, in an effort to expunge the ghost. He’s not the only one haunted by the role, which remains the template for every young Hollywood actor eager to put the lucre...

Martin Scorsese has tackled the mob, the Dalai Lama and the real-life Wolf of Wall Street. But he appears to have met his match in Bill Clinton. Mr. Scorsese’s partly finished documentary about Mr. Clinton — which once seemed likely to be released as Hillary Rodham Clinton was navigating a presidential run — has stalled over disagreements about control, people briefed on the project said. Though parts of the film were shot over the last two years as Mr. Clinton made a philanthropic visit to Africa and elsewhere, the project is now indefinitely shelved, partly because Mr. Clinton insisted on...

Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” is all about excess. From orgies on a plane to cocaine and cash (or “fun coupons” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character calls them), the financial drama thrives in taking it up a notch. So it should be no surprise that Paramount’s R-rated film sets the all-time record for the use of the f-word. According to Wikipedia, the word “f***” is used 506 times over “The Wolf of Wall Street’s” 180-minute running time. Previously, the record for a non-documentary was Spike Lee’s 1999 film “Summer of Sam” with 435 instances.

Henry Hill -- the former mobster whose life story became the basis for the movie "Goodfellas" -- died today at the age of 69 ... TMZ has learned. TMZ spoke with Hill's girlfriend Lisa ... who told us Hill passed away in an L.A. hospital Tuesday after a long battle with an undisclosed illness. Lisa tells us, "He had been sick for a long time ... his heart gave out." We're told Hill had focused on mending relationships with estranged family members in recent years ... and Lisa tells us he had made tremendous progress before he died. Hill leaves...

Just wondered if anyone had seen Scorsese's new 3D movie, "Hugo". I saw it this weekend and enjoyed it and wondered what others thought? (you might want to avoid reading this thread if you haven't seen it yet)

According to an AFP report Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese plans to adapt the 1966 novel “Silence” by Shusaku Endo for the screen. The book tells the story of a young Jesuit priest from Portugal who lands in southern Japan, and of Japan’s brutal persecution of Catholics during the 17th century.

Frank "Lefty'' Rosenthal was a Chicago bookie who was sent to Las Vegas by the mob and helped turned sports betting into a billion-dollar business. The manager of several well-known casinos, his life inspired the Martin Scorsese movie "Casino.'' Rosenthal, 79, died Monday after a heart attack at his Miami Beach condo. Born in 1929 in Chicago, Rosenthal got involved in illegal bookmaking and eventually connected with mobsters. His nickname stemmed from a 1961 Senate hearing on gambling and organized crime at which he invoked the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination 38 times. Throughout his testimony, he kept his left...

STROUDSBURG, Pa. (AP) - "Goodfellas" actor Paul Sorvino pulled a gun on his daughter's ex-boyfriend after the man pounded on her hotel door and made threats, the daughter testified Tuesday. "He got in my father's face and said, 'Go ahead, Paul, shoot, I ain't done nothing wrong,'" Amanda Sorvino, 36, told a Monroe County judge. The judge granted her request for a protection-from-abuse order against Daniel Snee, 21. Amanda Sorvino testified Snee threatened to kill her at a hotel Jan. 3 in Stowe, Vt.; she said she locked herself in the bathroom and called both police and her father. Her...

DiCaprio is Theodore Roosevelt Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese have been named by Paramount Pictures to respectively star and direct in the adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Edmund Morris book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, says Variety. The film adaptation, currently being written by Nicholas Meyer (The Human Stain), will chronicle the political career of Roosevelt (DiCaprio), from a slight and privileged New York politician with a Harvard degree, right up to his ascension to the White House as the 26th U.S. president. At present, DiCaprio and Scorsese are working on their third film together - after Gangs of New...

If you give Million Dollar Baby half a chance, you're gonna cry. "You're gonna cry," the ticket-seller, a Spanish lady in her late fifties, told me. And she was right. Million Dollar Baby is about two kinds of hunger: The hunger for glory that gnaws at those who seemingly have no chance at it, and the hunger for the love that bonds a father and a daughter, even if the two are not father and daughter. Clint Eastwood is hot again. In 2003, his movie Mystic River, in which he did not act, was up for all of the major...

One was a movie about an American filmmaker and aviation pioneer who ambitiously and recklessly became a multi-millionaire; the other was about the Son of God. One was directed by a legendary filmmaker; the other came from an Oscar-winning director. One film's protagonist descended into madness and died from syphilis; the other's was murdered, buried, and rose from the dead, bringing hope to humanity. One is a moderate success; the other a $370 million blockbuster that rocked Hollywood's expectations and perspective. These two films—Martin Scorsese's The Aviator and Mel Gibson's The Passion of The Christ—earned a total of 14 Oscar...

Acting Patriotic We often hear from the "anti-war" crowd that "dissent is what America is all about." That by protesting against the war, they are not "unpatriotic," rather, they are the "true patriots." Not to mention the pat on the back they give to themselves because of their "bravery." Bravery has many definitions, "The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, glory and danger alike, and yet notwithstanding go out to meet it." – Thucydides. More to the point, "Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless...

BERLIN (Reuters) - New York film director Spike Lee led a chorus of criticism against President Bush at the Berlin Film Festival Wednesday, telling the president he had no moral authority to launch a war against Iraq. Going out of his way to praise the French and German governments for their outspoken resistance to the U.S. government's war moves, Lee said it was an outrage that Bush was ignoring world opinion in his rush to attack Iraq. "When you think about it, the German and French governments should be commended," Lee said at a news conference after his film "25th...