Wes Craven’s decades-long career is often correlated with a trifecta of tent-pole achievements. First came The Last House on the Left (1972), a customarily described “exploitation” film inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring (1960). Next, Craven revolutionized the horror genre with his surrealist slasher A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), a tonally adventurous work that evokes the likes of Luis Buñuel and Jean Cocteau. Finally, the director upended conventions with the postmodern Scream (1996), whose credit is owed in no small part to Kevin Williamson’s extraordinarily reflexive and meta-cinematic script. Some might also attribute The Hills Have Eyes (1977) with the status of “classic” genre fare, although it owes a large part of its style and sensibility to Tobe Hooper’s masterful The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).

This characterizing of Craven’s career is problematic, not because it’s “untrue,” but because it’s woefully incomplete. Out of the three films listed above…

Assessed on its own terms, Martin Scorsese’s Silence is a daunting piece. Released after about 25 years of staggered development, it might reasonably be considered the most “definitive” title in its director’s oeuvre. That is, seeing as it incorporates so many of the auteur’s career-long questions regarding Christianity, violence and self, the film plays like a cumulative statement. Indeed, it’s worth contextualizing its lofty philosophical and formal concepts alongside previous Scorsese films. There are a number of ways to approach this strategy. In “Holy Men, Holy Losers: Scorsese, Silence and the Mystery of Faith,” Bilge Ebiri has already written insightfully on the movie’s connections to its auteur’s most openly faith-based works, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997); additionally, Scorsese himself has alluded in interviews to its connections with Bringing Out the Dead (1999). These points of reference are key, and it is also worth reflecting on Silence both…

Two years before Martin Scorsese cast Nick Nolte as the protagonist of his ambitious Cape Fear remake, he chose the actor for the leading role in Life Lessons (the director’s 40-minute contribution to the 1989 anthology film New York Stories). The first in a trio of featurettes rounded out by Francis Ford Coppola’s Life without Zoe and Woody Allen’s Oedipus Wrecks, Life Lessons finds within Nolte the capacity for reinterpreting a stock character. Scorsese would later challenge the actor to apply a similar process of reinvention in Cape Fear (1991), which the director reportedly wrote off initially in a conversation with his friend Steven Spielberg. At first, Scorsese claimed that he couldn’t expand on the Manichean morality of the 1962 original. Upon Spielberg’s argument that Scorsese could easily shape the project to satisfy his own vision, however, the director reinterpreted Cape Fear’s straightforward ethics, and called Nolte to drastically…

While revisiting Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore for the first time in over 10 years, I was struck by two realizations. First, it suddenly dawned on me that throughout his career, Martin Scorsese has most consistently been a director of character-oriented drama. While this might seem a rather obvious observation to some, it is easy to see Scorsese first as a cinema historian who makes cinema about itself, or as a versatile director of genre pictures. While these latter two attributes do inform his work, I’ve noticed with a recent slew of retrospective viewings that the auteur concerns himself always with the study of character above else. The second realization I had was that while Scorsese’s filmography has repeatedly returned to the subject of violent masculinity, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is the first and last film in which he has approached the subject primarily from a woman’s perspective. Indeed…

Martin Scorsese’s latest film Silence reportedly continues the thematic thread of faith that began with The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and continued with Kundun (1997). Looking back at the auteur’s career (now nearly half a century long), it’s easy to identify a number of recurring fixations and impulses. The director has always shown expertise at representing subject experience through form (from the unharnessed camera movement and woozy voice-over of Mean Streets [1973] to the hyper-discordant editing of The Wolf of Wall Street [2013]). Scorsese rarely employs a shot or a cut simply for the purpose of documentation or function, focusing much more instead on the connection between technique and subject. That the director’s technique so often draws in a tapestry of endless music cues (e.g. GoodFellas [1990] and Casino [1995]) or period details (e.g. The Age of Innocence [1993] and Gangs of New York [2002]) speaks to the ways in…

Although President Elect Donald Trump has not yet been sworn into office, the term “Trump’s America” has already become a usual suspect in film criticism. Indeed, it’s difficult to avoid reflecting on this seismic political event when viewing contemporary American films. Recently, I’ve found myself thinking back to James Benning’s Stemple Pass, an experimental film released in 2012 (incidentally, midway through Barack Obama’s eight-year presidency). Benning’s film deals with distinctly American subject matter, and those sociopolitical fixations warrant close analysis. Those fixations include the obsessive lust for “returning to the past,” an intensifying fear of the outsider and the tenuous connection between the human and the nonhuman (this last topic underpins issues like factory farming and capital expansion at the cost of environmental damage).

I caution against referring to Stemple Pass simply as a work of “non-narrative” cinema, because its progression is so rigorously and specifically designed. The film…