Taxi Driver (1976)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter: Paul Schrader
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel

On a steamy street in New York on a hot summer night, a cab pulls into frame, followed by an intense shot of eyes bathed in neon light and a psychedelic rendering of the city’s ceaseless hustle and bustle. The American New Wave, or New Hollywood, was brimming with films that brought arthouse sensibilities to the American mainstream, and Martin Scorsese’s neo-noir crime thriller is among the best. More than a vehicle for star Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver represents a convergence of genre and style from across place and time, painting a dreary picture of its contemporary America that still resonates today.

Taxi Driver was the second of Scorsese’s films to feature Robert De Niro, and it’s the movie that really put Scorsese on the map as the best filmmaker of the “auteur generation” – the group of 70s American filmmakers who grew up loving and studying film in a way their predecessors hadn’t. By 1976, Scorsese had made Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets, and his film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore had been nominated for Oscars. But Taxi Driver took his career to another level, scoring him the Palme d’Or at Cannes and another round of Oscar nominations.

The story, written by Paul Schrader, follows a Vietnam veteran named Travis Bickle who tries his hand at driving cabs. He is tortured by an inability to sleep and a lack of human connection beyond what he sees on TV or in a porno theater, which drives him to derangement, causing him to direct his inner conflict outward through violence. 

While Travis is not a character to be admired, he is certainly one audiences can sympathize with. He’s socially awkward, demonstrated by his early encounters with Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy, a worker on a Presidential campaign staff, and a talk with fellow cabbie Wiz, to whom Travis can’t quite explain his feelings of estrangement. In his search for connection, he stumbles upon a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, and feels a misplaced sense of patriarchal protection for her. It’s through Foster’s character that Travis ultimately finds his outlet for his angst, creating a moment that challenges our preconceptions of heroics. His views, however, expressed through his journal, are abhorrent, filled with racist rhetoric and descriptions of New York’s citizens as scum and vile. 

But De Niro plays such a morally complex character to a T. De Niro is widely recognized for his charm, so it’s quite interesting to see him adapt himself to fit Travis’ socially inept characteristics. He has an ability to utilize his charisma as a front, like when Travis initially seduces Betsy, leaving viewers all the more embarrassed on his behalf when he doesn’t understand why she was upset he brought her to see a porno on their first date. De Niro captures Travis’ sense of alienation and impotence, but finds a way to humanize him. Part of the authenticity of Travis comes from Scorsese allowing improvisation, particularly with De Niro. Arguably the film’s most famous scene is entirely improvised, as De Niro stands before a mirror and says, “You talkin’ to me?”

Jodie Foster really steals the show in her role, one that had to be approved and monitored by child welfare professionals. She rehearsed and improvised with De Niro around New York, and feels entirely authentic and bright within the film despite the dark nature of her character. In one of her best scenes, she has breakfast with Travis at a diner wearing hilarious green sunglasses, and her teenage self is finally allowed to be expressed. She eats a jelly and sugar sandwich while Travis goes on about how she needs to be home with her parents, and in typical teenager fashion she calls him a square and starts talking about how she and her pimp get along because they’re both Libras. Speaking of her pimp, he’s played by Harvey Keitel in a wig sporting a ten-gallon pimp hat, and while it’s understandable why he doesn’t play a larger role, Keitel’s performance makes you wish he did.

Taxi Driver also serves as a symbol of the convergence of commercial American filmmaking, European new waves, classic Hollywood auteurism, and exploitation films. The film borrows from The Searchers through the protagonist’s quest to save a woman who may not want to be saved, and there are direct visual allusions to Psycho through an overhead tracking shot in the finale, drawing parallels between Travis and Norman Bates. A shot onto dissolving alka-seltzer has been compared to Godard’s Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and clearly functions as a symbol of Travis’ simmering violence. It also features raw, unbridled violence that had been traditionally reserved for Italian horror and Corman flicks. The shot of Murray Motson’s mangled hand, an effect created by Dick Smith, and the spurts of blood from Travis and others elevated cinematic violence from The Godfather to a more intimate level.

Taxi Driver is also notable for being the final film score from legendary composer Bernard Hermann, best known for Citizen Kane and Psycho. His score creates the neo-noir atmosphere as Travis prowls the streets of New York for fares. Perhaps the best of the score is the music of the dramatic finale, punctuating the bloody shootout. It’s a classic, studio-era type of sound with tense horns, oscillating strings, and foreboding timpani drums. It’s a beautiful piece that gives audiences the sense of slipping into a dream, causing one to wonder if the scene or the film’s epilogue are even real. Hermann passed mere hours after completing the score, which earned him a posthumous Oscar nomination.

Through a modern lens, one might wonder what the value of Taxi Driver is? Its perspective from a nihilist racist feels particularly useless in a post-Trump world, where we seem to be constantly subjected to the inner thoughts of the more deplorable denizens of society. There’s an entire rant in the film, delivered by Scorsese (standing in for an injured actor), about shooting a woman in her vagina for having an affair with a black man. The value lies in its indictment of society’s treatment of men, how the structural patriarchal forces that create the idea of masculinity fail to truly care for America’s men, and how that leads to them finding inappropriate outlets for their feelings because they don’t know how to express themselves. America is still facing the problem of disaffected men turning to violence against women, or larger forces like schools or churches, and we seem to be out of ideas for how to solve it. Taxi Driver doesn’t offer solutions, but clearly elucidates the problem in incredible cinematic fashion.

Taxi Driver’s legacy may not endure. It was great for its time and place, but Scorsese is more popularly associated with Goodfellas and Casino, which feature two other spectacular De Niro performances. But Taxi Driver is an essential film when examining the career of Scorsese and De Niro, and the American New Wave. Its darker themes, violence, and style make it a landmark work in the history of American cinema.

Score: 21/24

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The Piano (1993)
Director: Jane Campion
Screenwriter: Jane Campion
Starring: Holly Hunter, Harvey Keitel, Sam Neill, Anna Paquin

Jane Campion’s The Piano begins with a monologue from Ada McGrath, a young Scottish woman who, for reasons that are never fully explained, stops speaking at the age of 6. She cautions us that the voice we hear, the high pitched, lyrical voice of Holly Hunter doing an impeccable Scottish accent, is not her speaking voice, but her mind’s voice. Ada’s father recently married her off to a man she does not know, and she and her young daughter, Flora (Anna Paquin), are being shipped off to live with him on the coast of colonial New Zealand. Her new husband, Alistair Stewart (Sam Neill) says he does not mind her muteness, which Ada says is a good thing. “Silence affects us all in the end,” she cautions.

The Piano, released in the summer of 1993, earned writer and director Jane Campion the prestigious honor being the first female director to win the Palme d’Ore at the Cannes Film festival. 30 years later, The Piano remains one of Campion’s most recognizable and beloved films, revered for its performances – Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin both received Academy Awards for their work – score, and haunting cinematography. It’s a gothic tale of love and lust and the violent ways men seek to control not just women, but the world.

Ada may not physically use her voice to speak, but she is not silent. She communicates in many ways throughout the film using sign language, pen and paper, her piano. For Campion, the piano symbolizes Ada’s voice, and the way the men in the film treat her piano speaks volumes about who they are. Stewart is clearly ignorant and unwilling to truly listen to Ada, to learn to communicate in her way. He disregards her piano, leaving it on the beach, selling it off, and eventually taking an axe to it. In contrast, George Baines (Harvey Keitel), rescues her piano – he gets it tuned for her. He sits next to her as she plays. He learns her language.

The Piano features stellar performances across the board, but Holly Hunter is a particular knock out. She’s practically unrecognizable as Ada, truly embodying this maddening, strong-willed, opinionated woman, changing the cadence of her voice, her face pale and eyes dark. Hunter proves what audiences have known since the silent era – acting is more than just talking, more than just words. You have to put your entire body into it. Hunter’s physicality is loud and demanding – she breaks glasses, she twists her face in anger and disapproval, she signs with passion. The fact that Hunter does all of the piano playing in the movie by herself only adds to how authentic her portrayal feels.

Sam Neill and Harvey Keitel are equally as good as Ada’s possessive husband and her eventual lover, respectively. Neill gives a particularly nuanced performance as a man who takes out is own inadequacy on everyone around him. It is a quiet, burning performance that builds to a fantastic, terrifying explosion of repressed anger and jealousy.

The Piano is fashioned after the classic gothic romance that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, clearly inspired by many of the female voices that dominated the genre. Campion’s films in general borrow heavily from gothic horror and romance. Her films are often beautiful and horrifying at the same time, sex and violence and mystery all tangled up together. As has been pointed out by numerous critics in the past, the film feels deeply literary, an adaptation of a much older tale. In particular, Campion said that Wuthering Heights was one of the sources she drew upon for inspiration. It’s also worth noting that the play the children perform in the movie is “Blue Beard“, the French folktale in which a man murders his wives and hides their bodies away in a secret room in his manor.

While the film isn’t quite that bloody, it is violent and cruel. Stewart is uninterested in nurturing who Ada is. He doesn’t understand her, so he has to break her, to make her submit. Ada may not speak in words, but she is still the kind of woman who must be reigned in and caged. After a particular act of gruesome violence towards the end of the movie leaves Ada bleeding and covered in mud, Stewart says simply, “I only clipped your wing.” Vitally, Campion contrasts this brutality with scenes of gentle intimacy. Touch is a huge part of The Piano, and Campion highlights how in Victorian society merely touching someone through a small hole in their stocking is infinitely erotic. Campion uses the nakedness of her characters to show how vulnerable it feels to show someone that part of yourself. While the nudity in The Piano is by no means excessive, it does remind us of something we’ve lost in modern cinema: the ability to portray genuine intimacy and eroticism. The ability to feel.

While The Piano focuses mainly on Ada and her journey, the film also explores the detrimental effects of colonialism on the environment and its indigenous people, although Campion’s depiction of the Maori has been criticized for playing into racist stereotypes. And it’s true that Campion does not spend much time developing these characters. They are portrayed as simple-minded, sexually suggestive, and unrefined. Reshela DuPuis delves this and more in her essay, “Romanticizing Colonialism: Power and Pleasure in Jane Campion’s The Piano.“

Still, it’s worth noting that Stewart’s treatment of the Maori people is clearly wrong. He tries to take their land, bribing them with everything from guns to buttons. He can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want to give up their sacred burial grounds. Just as with his treatment of Ada, Stewart is uninterested in understanding anyone who doesn’t speak his own language, believing them to be unintelligent and inhuman.

In 2013, Campion said that she originally intended for The Piano to have a much bleaker ending. “It would be more real, wouldn’t it?” Campion said during an interview with The Guardian. Perhaps it would be more real. As it stands, the ending is one of the most iconic sequences of the film.

The ending, like the rest of the film, sticks with you. It gets under your skin and crawls around. With The Piano, Jane Campion gives us one of the strongest female characters of the late 20th century, entangled in a story that is as vast, as dark and as deep as the ocean itself.

Score: 23/24

Recommended for you: Jane Campion Films Ranked

Jane Campion’s eight feature films, from her 1989 debut Sweetie to her most recent, Oscar-winning revisionist western, The Power of the Dog (2021), primarily deal with gender politics and often explore complex, dysfunctional relationships among families. Campion is unflinching in her portrayal of sex and violence, her films just as gentle and beautiful as they are brutal, wild, and untamed.

Because of her distinct style, Jane Campion manages to capture something both painful and true about human nature, with all its flaws and contradictions. In an industry dominated by men, this woman director chooses to center most of her films around women, offering a perspective on female rage, desire, and sexuality, that is often ignored.

As an artist, Campion of course has her shortcomings. The marriage between her style and certain texts doesn’t always work out, something that is made clear when comparing her many adaptations. In addition, while she has been branded as a “feminist” filmmaker by some, she has been criticized for not engaging more directly with feminism by others.

Over the course of this director’s decades-long career, her movies have garnered numerous awards and praise. She is the only woman to be nominated twice for Best Director at the Academy Awards and was the first female filmmaker to receive the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival (for The Piano).

In this edition of Ranked, we at The Film Magazine are evaluating all eight of Jane Campion’s feature films. We’ll take a deep dive into her directing, writing, and overall filmmaking process to determine which films can be judged to be the most artistic, the most enjoyable, the most formidable, and the most important. From her obvious hits and missteps to her misunderstood masterpiece, these are the Jane Campion Movies Ranked.

Follow @thefilmagazine on Twitter.

8. Holy Smoke! (1999)

Released in 1999, Holy Smoke!, written by Jane Campion and her sister Anna Campion, follows American exit counsellor, P.J. Waters (Harvey Keitel), who is sent to Australia to deprogram Ruth (Kate Winslet), a young woman believed by her family to have been indoctrinated into a cult in India. When Ruth agrees to spend three days with P.J., the two embark on a spiritual journey that leaves them – and us – questioning just who is deprogramming who.

Holy Smoke! is probably Campion’s only film that addresses feminism and gender roles in a very literal way. Campion is known for her sparse dialogue and use of symbolism, but in Holy Smoke!, Winslet and Keitel spout pages of dialog at each other. Their explosive interactions become a sounding board for Campion’s own feminist ideals. It’s engrossing to watch, and both Winslet and Keitel give genuinely great performances, but the film is heavy handed and it sometimes feels like Campion is talking at us.

Holy Smoke! is hard to pin down, especially when watching it for the first time. Ruth’s family’s absurd fear of foreign cultures and their inability to understand them is played up to the point of satire, but the movie doesn’t quite commit. It’s a strange blend of drama and absurdist comedy. While Sweetie, Campion’s feature debut, balances tonal shifts like this with ease, Holy Smoke! feels jarring and uneven. Still, as Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times during the period of the film’s initial release, Holy Smoke! is “bathed in divine light” and has a “sensual allure” that is hard to tear yourself away from, despite its inconsistencies.

Holy Smoke! has layers, although it does take a rewatch or two to unpeel them all. Its characters are messy and contradictory, and Campion doesn’t really care about proving who is right or wrong. Was Ruth actually in a cult? Or did she just simply find herself? Who knows? That isn’t the point. Like Keitel who, by the end of the movie, is left wandering about the Australian outback with only one shoe, you’re completely turned around by the time the credits roll. In presenting two characters that are pushing each other to question their beliefs, Campion urges us to do the same.

7. Portrait of a Lady (1996)

The Portrait of a Lady was Jane Campion’s next film following the massive success of The Piano. Based on Henry James’ novel of the same name, the film tells the story of Isabelle Archer (Nicole Kidman). Isabelle, an American, is sent to live with her uncle’s family in London following the death of her parents. She rejects several marriage proposals, stubbornly holding onto her freedom, and when her uncle dies and leaves her a fortune, Isabelle is free to travel and do as she pleases. Eventually she is manipulated by Madam Serena Merle (Barbara Hershey) into marrying Gilbert Osmond (John Malkovich), a cruel and egotistical artist, who turns Isabelle’s life into a nightmare from which she cannot escape.

While The Portrait of a Lady received numerous awards nominations, the overall critical reception was lukewarm, which had a lot to do with changes Campion and screenwriter Laura Jones made to James’ original text. While Isabelle is headstrong and intelligent in the novel, Nicole Kidman’s Isabelle is timid and quiet. Because of this, she ends up feeling more like a victim than an idealist – more pitiful than tragic.

The casting of John Malkovich as Osmond was also called into question. At the time of its release, many critics noted that Malkovich wasn’t believable as someone Isabelle would fall in love with, especially since her other suitors, Lord Warburton (Richard E. Grant) and Casper Goodwood (Viggo Mortenson), seemed far more genuine by comparison. To quote Roger Ebert: “He (Osmond) is an Artist–able to pose, at least during their courtship, as a man who lives on a higher plane. In Campion’s film, Osmond is never allowed the slightest plausibility.”

Even so, it’s easy to dismiss all of that because The Portrait of a Lady is utterly breathtaking to look at. The production design is dreamy and ethereal with its lush scenery and glowing sunlight that paints each frame in a soft blur. Isabelle’s environment gradually grows colder, the marble and stone of Ancient Rome encasing her as she sinks further into isolation.

It is impossible to watch this movie and not feel it deeply. Jane Campion articulates something so visceral about loneliness and desire – sometimes without her characters saying a single word. Though it might not work completely on a narrative level, It is hard to find fault in a vision as focused and unapologetic as this.

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Martin Scorsese was part of the 1970s American auteur wave, and is arguably the most successful of the bunch as an artist. He exemplifies the traditional idea of the film auteur. While Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were working on Hollywood blockbusters, Scorsese was making Taxi Driver, New York, New York, and Raging Bull, three different films that varied with audiences and critics but were undoubtedly Scorsese films. As a lifelong cinephile, his films have always been informed by Hollywood’s past, and have continuously alluded to film history through style, genre, and direct homage. In addition to cinematic fascination, his films have inspiration from his own upbringing. His gangster films reflect the ethos of his Italian youth and culture converging with the big dreams and excesses of American society both in style and content. His editing and cinematography pack as much of a punch as any of the characters, each of whom are driven by powerful performances.

There are all kinds of places to go within the cinema of Martin Scorsese. The goal of this piece is to start at the roots, to really get a handle on what made Scorsese such a great filmmaker and storyteller, and to grow towards his magnum opus. This is Where to Start with Martin Scorsese.

1. Mean Streets (1973)

Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese’s breakout third feature following early recognition for his student films. He wrote the story and collaborated on the screenplay, and this is thought to be the first film upon which he was truly in control of production. In his 1979 book “American Film Now”, critic and author James Monaco described Mean Streets as Scorsese’s one great achievement, noting its status as a personal and original film (154).

Harvey Keitel stars as a small-time gangster in Little Italy, and the character’s practical outlook at the beginning of the film speaks to Scorsese’s own views on Catholicism: “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it at home. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Keitel’s Charlie struggles with living his best on the streets, his problems exacerbated by Robert De Niro’s character Johnny. The film is rough around the edges, but brimming with style. The red lights of a bar and street-level gangsters offer a different look at the gangster genre than Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, released the year prior. 

It’s important to see Mean Streets because of how the film works as a foundation for Scorsese’s future work. This was the filmmaker’s first collaboration with Robert De Niro (with whom he’d partner on some of the most iconic films of the era), it was a new take on the gangster genre, it took the then-unusual route of featuring hip music in its soundtrack, and its narrative truly drives home the tragic nature of the human condition. If you’re a cinephile, this is exactly the kind of movie people like us were gushing over, the latest film from one of the hottest young directors.

2. Italianamerican (1974)

Martin Scorsese has a body of documentary work almost as large as his feature filmography. His best is his most personal, Italianamerican.

Italianamerican is quite simple: Scorsese puts cameras in front of his parents in their New York apartment and interviews them about their lives and the lives of their family. The parents, Charles and Catherine, were the children of immigrants from Sicily. They have such a fascinating perspective on life because of the working class circumstances in which they grew up, and the film shows how people like his parents were able to achieve what they saw as the American dream.

Scorsese’s parents are natural in front of the camera despite Charles’ protestations that Catherine is putting on airs. The two are honest, and give the impression that we’re sitting down beside them in the kitchen to listen to their stories directly. You can almost taste the meatballs and sauce that Catherine cooks – there’s even a recipe for them at the end.

Italianamerican is important as a window into this great director’s work as it allows you to see another side of his creative output; a soft side that aims to tell real stories of everyday people, to blur the lines between film and reality.

3. Goodfellas (1990)

Goodfellas Review

Goodfellas is Martin Scorsese’s greatest creation as a filmmaker, and the result of the perspective that making a documentary film and making a fiction film are the same process.

In this 6-time Oscar-nominated film, Scorsese tells the dramatized true story of half-Irish, half-Italian gangster Henry Hill, based on crime reporter Nick Pileggi’s novel “Wiseguy”. Goodfellas has all the style of Mean Streets, but it’s incredibly polished after nearly two decades of filmmaking experience. The silhouette of the male leads digging a grave against a red light is just as striking as Mean Streets’ club scene, but its darker nature creates a more provocative image.

Ray Liotta is outstanding as Henry Hill, hitting a variety of emotional beats that are capped off by a frantic, paranoid coke binge at the film’s end. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci are highlights of the cast, but it’s Lorraine Bracco as Henry’s wife Karen who really steals the show. There’s no true star in the ensemble cast, making the place and lifestyle the film’s central focus. Goodfellas presents the allure of the gangster lifestyle, and hits all the beats expected of the gangster genre by the late 1980s when audiences had perhaps seen it all.

Martin Scorsese’s past and future films address similar themes to Goodfellas, but none are quite so compelling visually. The film is dynamic, the editing and cinematography evolving with the characters over the course of the film, and its function as a representation of reality makes it unlike Mean Streets or even genre great The Godfather, the natural performances elevating the film beyond a general desire for unintrusive acting. Catherine Scorsese herself even makes an appearance in a fully improvised scene. When it comes to Martin Scorsese’s filmography, Goodfellas cannot be beat and is a must for anyone seeking the opportunity to experience this great American director’s unique filmmaking for the first time.

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You can’t go wrong watching anything in Martin Scorsese’s filmography, but these three films will give the most insight into this legendary auteur’s interests, background, and outlook on life. Should you take the advice of this piece, then Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Casino are great places to go next.

Isle of Dogs (2018)
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenwriters: Wes Anderson, Roman Coppola
Starring: Bryan Cranston, Jeff Goldblum, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, Greta Gerwig, Yoko Ono

Following on from the critical and public smash that was The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson returned to screens after a break of four years with 2018’s Isle of Dogs. The film was Anderson’s second foray into the world of stop-motion animation after 2009’s Fantastic Mr Fox. As with all Anderson projects, the ensemble cast proved to be one of the main draws, on this occasion led by the voice of ‘Breaking Bad’ star Bryan Cranston and Anderson regulars Bill Murray and Jeff Goldblum, each of whom played members of a group of dogs exiled to Trash Island by the infamous Kenji Kobayashi, mayor of Megasaki, whose family was proven to have a generations-deep hatred of canines.

Upon release, Isle of Dogs earned rave reviews and received nominations throughout awards season for Best Animated Feature. Writing in The Guardian, leading British film critic Mark Kermode noted that “Isle of Dogs is a delight: funny, touching and full of heartfelt warmth and wit”. This certainly wasn’t the only outpouring of love for the film, with many noting how well Anderson’s style suited the animation, praising the film’s quirkiness and humour. There have been some detractors who have criticised the way it depicts Japanese culture, with accusations of cultural appropriation, but the overarching consensus is that Isle of Dogs turned out to be one of Anderson’s stronger films.

The core narrative of Isle of Dogs centres on Mayor Kobayashi’s nephew Atari (Koyu Rankin) who sets off to Trash Island to recover his guard dog spots (voiced by Liev Schreiber). Along the way Atari encounters Chief (Cranston), Duke (Goldblum), Rex (Edward Norton), Boss (Murray) and King (Bob Balaban), and together they form a ragtag crew of exiled dogs, all of whom are slightly world-weary and struggling to survive in their newfound world separated from humanity.

The story focuses on both the situation on the island itself and the developing issues on the mainland, where we follow efforts from the government to cover up the fake disease that was used as the reason to exile the dogs. We also follow US foreign exchange student Tracy Walker (voiced by Lady Bird and Little Women director Greta Gerwig) in her efforts to expose the mayor’s lies.

The voice cast is one of the film’s clearest strengths, with Bryan Cranston suitably gruff and grizzled as Chief, a dog whose relationship with Atari and his fellow dogs form the film’s core. Jeff Goldblum’s Duke acts more as comic relief, while there is a fun smaller part for Tilda Swinton as Oracle, a seemingly wise dog.

While the film zips along as many of Anderson’s other films do, it still has a strong sense of heart and intimacy, and the way the relationship between Atari and Chief develops is especially indicative of this.

The score from Anderson regular Alexandre Desplat is another of the film’s high points. Incorporating traditional Japanese soundscapes and built around taiko drums with flourishes of woodwind, the score acts as a nice contrast to Desplat’s previous Anderson compositions – there are even nods to the works of Akira Kurosawa and glimpses of Prokofiev’s “Lieutenant Kijé” throughout the film. In between the more typically Japanese sounds of the score, Desplat and Anderson leave room for spots of popular music as has become customary of Anderson’s filmography, in this case focusing mainly on the eerie tones of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

Isle of Dogs is a loving tale of canine and human friendship, recreating the culture of Japan in a heartfelt manner that illustrates Anderson’s appreciation for Japanese culture and the nation’s people. As with other Anderson films, the offbeat nature may prove to be off-putting to newcomers, but Anderson purists are in for a treat filled with familiar voices who blend into their surroundings meticulously.

Isle of Dogs once again illustrated Wes Anderson’s versatility as a director and was a bold move away from the trappings of The Grand Budapest Hotel which had earned such acclaim. With a filmography that only looks set to grow, one can only hope that Anderson makes further trips into the world of animation.

20/24

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Director: Wes Anderson
Screenwriter: Wes Anderson
Starring: Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Keitel, Jeff Goldblum, Mathieu Amalric, Owen Wilson, Léa Seydoux, Jude Law, Tom Wilkinson, F. Murray Abraham

Following the release of the acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom in 2012, Wes Anderson would make perhaps one of the defining films of the 2010s and one of the most praised in his storied filmography. 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel has proven to be a gargantuan success in the seven years since its release, earning the joint most nominations at the 2015 Oscars with 9 (equal with Birdman), and featuring on the BBC’s 2016 list of the Best Films of the 21^st Century, a list that also featured Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums and Moonrise Kingdom.

The Grand Budapest Hotel was immediately acclaimed in reviews from most major sources, with Empire publishing, “For those willing to check in without prejudice, this may well be among Anderson’s better films, one of the few that repay repeated viewings”. The Grand Budapest Hotel seems to be a film that even some of Anderson’s detractors have found various levels of enjoyment in. While it is too soon to say if this is his most universally praised film, the sheer levels of fandom it has created indicate it is in contention to be one of his most beloved.

This colourful 2014 release follows a lowly lobby boy named Zero (Tony Revolori) as he starts his life working at the eponymous establishment in the fictional nation of Zubrowka. Following a series of flashbacks through various decades, the bulk of the story occupies the space between the two World Wars, acting somewhat as a musing on the rise of Fascism in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. Zero works under the tutelage of the eccentric Monsieur M Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), the hotel’s concierge who has had a number of affairs with elderly wealthy women including the mysterious Madame D (Tilda Swinton). Following Madame D’s death, Gustave and Zero are embroiled in a series of escapades relating to Madame D’s will and the grievances of her family, finding themselves at odds with local law enforcement.

Perhaps the film’s biggest strength is its tone, Anderson fully committing to his trademarked quirky dialogue and humour which on paper is at odds with the time period in which the story is set. The balance between humour and darkness at times walks a fine line, but Ralph Fiennes’ Gustave is never short of a quip or two and this often offsets some of the darker moments. This is arguably one of Anderson’s most outright funny films, and whether or not it would be classed as a comedy certainly leans heavily on the comedic chops of its leads, with Fiennes excelling in a role worlds away from most of his work to this point and earning some of the best reviews in his own storied career.

Alexandre Desplat’s score is one of his finest – featuring notable Russian folk undertones – and rightly won the Oscar for Original Score. The score is complementary of the film’s setting and period, and works wonderfully in contrast to Anderson’s more pop and rock heavy soundtracks present in the filmmaker’s previous films.

While all of Anderson’s films are ensemble affairs to differing extents, The Grand Budapest Hotel features one of his finest, with each of the cast getting their moments to shine, be it Willem Dafoe as a mercenary, Jeff Goldblum as a show-stealing lawyer, Adrien Brody, Edward Norton or Saoirse Ronan. While the film does well to allow its large cast of supporting characters to have moments in the spotlight, the film undoubtedly belongs to the duo of Ralph Fiennes and Tony Revolori.

It’s not hard to see why The Grand Budapest Hotel has gleaned such love over the past seven years. It is a perfect encapsulation of the best of Anderson’s works, with its fast-paced dialogue and candy coloured visual palette. Anchored by an eccentric Ralph Fiennes offering some of the finest work of his career, the tone is balanced to perfection, its absurdity meeting deeper moments in a seamless and wholly enjoyable fashion. There are few films that can boast such a complete authorial vision as The Grand Budapest Hotel, a film that sets the high marker for Wes Anderson’s acclaimed career.

23/24

The Irishman (2019)
Director: Martin Scorsese
Screenwriter: Steven Zaillian
Starring: Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Al Pacino, Stephen Graham, Anna Paquin, Ray Romano, Jesse Plemons, Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale, Jack Huston

A thrilling, nostalgic and self-retrospective gangster movie from a directorial master of the form, The Irishman, based on the novel “I Heard You Paint Houses” by Charles Brandt, is epic in both run-time and contents, the superb control exerted upon the narrative’s scopious amounts of information by the great Martin Scorsese making for a truly extraordinary moment in American cinema in 2019.

Once Upon A Time in America… an indelible piece of the American way was the honourable gangster, and despite how great his movies were and have continued to be, the same holds true of the work of Scorsese, The Irishman signalling a return to the genre he moulded from the black and white of Classic Hollywood into a contemporary powerhouse through movies like Mean Streets, Goodfellas and The Departed. This revisitation, and his much anticipated reunions with Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, make for a movie that in of itself must be considered a proverbial wave goodbye to the very figures that have made such an incomparable impact upon his work. In this respect, The Irishman feels like not only a retrospective on Scorsese himself, his gangster films or even the gangster genre as a whole, but as a loving last hurrah to the great and powerful work of his closest collaborators; Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino offering truly exceptional work (in some cases for the first time in years) in this powerful film.

While The Irishman unfortunately doesn’t feature a sweeping score to the same exceptional levels of Ennio Morricone’s work on Sergio Leone’s American crime epic Once Upon a Time in America (1984), there are certainly similarities between the two projects, not least the epically scaled time-hopping sagas at the hearts of each of them.

Told over three distinct periods of lead character Frank’s (De Niro’s) life, with further flashbacks and flash-forwards included from time to time, The Irishman takes on an immediately difficult to navigate time frame and scale, but with Scorsese in the driving seat it never gets out of control. Scorsese, like the very best of directors from his era, has a particular affinity with re-purposing and re-analysing the mythos of Americana, and through this decades-spanning narrative is able to pass comment on monumental moments in American history such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa.

This mythological exploration of course brings commentary on the “better” or “worse” ways of American life, but rather than leaning particularly hard in either direction, The Irishman seems to focus on creating a tangible representation of the sense of dread, regret and perhaps even nostalgia that comes with age or more notably death. It’s not that the picture is celebratory of ageing people or old age, more that it gives voice to the feeling of seeing life in all of its intricacies and all of its specifics quickly drain out of view. As much as it is a gangster film, and it truly is a gangster film, The Irishman is about the tragedy of time; the temporariness of life.

This is where the film’s notorious attempts to digitally de-age its lead actors came to take on more meaning than a simple party trick as, rather than casting different actors (as Leone did in OUATIA), the very purpose of de-ageing was intrinsic to the heart of The Irishman’s purpose, the casting being entirely appropriate for provoking our own senses of nostalgia and questions about age, what constitutes a person’s prime and so on.

The technique of de-ageing the central cast is, overall, particularly good. Though at first the effect is quite jarring – there always seems to be something about reflections, especially in the eyes, that they struggle to hit the bullseye with – it soon becomes utterly believable and (in the best way) entirely forgettable. There are some sequences that are well and truly remarkable in their digital artistry, and knowing that Scorsese was able to utilise this in a deep and artistic manner is truly a breath of fresh air.

De Niro is the actor most focused upon for this process, Pesci always playing an older man, and thankfully the CG didn’t detract from what was a tremendous performance. As the narrator, De Niro was the focus of the entire piece, his gravitas and monumental abilities coming to forge a character so strong that De Niro faded into Frank, an awards season push being sure to follow. Seeing the return of Joe Pesci to the big screen was also worth the wait, the legendary actor of Scorsese’s own Goodfellas bringing back the evil behind his eyes for a particularly impressive supporting performance. Pacino, although present less than his fellow cast members, was given a lot of scope to reproduce what we know and love of his more elaborate later work, but there are moments in The Irishman where the actor’s subtlety is truly gravitating, even scene stealing, making for a triumvirate of exceptional performances.

The Irishman is, then, a triumph in all aspects but particularly those of the filmmakers at its heart, this latest Scorsese film being an exceptional piece of cinema worth every second of its three and a half hour run-time and rumoured $200million budget – it seems Netflix were correct to put all their chips in on the project for a Best Picture Oscar because it certainly seems to be a front-runner.

In a world where Hollywood makes all of the industry’s money but it is international film taking the most extraordinary steps in the art-form, Scorsese has reminded us of the profoundly influential nature of American cinema in all of its artistic glory with the profound and quite spectacular The Irishman.

21/24