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Off-Beat

Iain Sinclair, 6 June 1996

... Uninvited by Bill Clinton to join other high-achieving Italian-Americans, such as Nicolas Cage, Martin Scorsese and ex-baseball player Joe Garagiola, at the bean-feast held in honour of President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Corso is typecast as an involuntary amnesia case, a sleeve-tugger of enormous charm. A street poet in an age that has no use for poets ...

Hitchcocko-Hawksien

Christopher Prendergast, 5 June 1997

Projections 7 
edited by John Boorman and Walter Donohue.
Faber, 308 pp., £11.99, April 1997, 0 571 19033 2
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. I: The Fifties. Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave 
edited by Jim Hillier.
Routledge, 312 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 15105 8
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. II: The Sixties. New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood 
edited by Jim Hillier.
Routledge, 363 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 15106 6
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Cahiers du cinema. Vol. III: 1969-72. The Politics of Representation 
edited by Nick Browne.
Routledge, 352 pp., £65, September 1996, 0 415 02987 2
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... In Martin Scorsese’s Casino, Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) remarks that Las Vegas is about ‘selling people dreams for cash’ and, in a memorable elaboration of this cliché, that ‘it does for us what Lourdes does for hunchbacks and cripples.’ Much the same has been said about the culture of cinema, and how Scorsese’s film stands in relation to its subject is an interesting question ...

Henry Hill and Laura Palmer

Philip Horne, 20 December 1990

... from within, from a recognition and rejection of human alikeness between watcher and villain. Martin Scorsese’s brutal, dazzling film about everyday life in the lower ranks of the Mafia, GoodFellas, plays with this gothic scheme of the watcher drawn into the criminal underworld, but with an irony that partly accounts for the work’s shocking ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’, 16 November 2023

... In Martin Scorsese’s​ new film, Killers of the Flower Moon, a man asks another man to ask another man to kill another man. This sounds like the beginning of a joke, and the degree of delegation verges on the comic. The last man is killed, so the rest of the story is not funny. But then why are the first and second men screaming at each other in a farcical quarrel about back and front? Because the dead man was thought to have attempted suicide and the plan was to make it look as if he had succeeded ...

Where’s the barbed wire?

John Lahr: August Wilson's Transformation, 9 May 2024

August Wilson: A Life 
by Patti Hartigan.
Simon and Schuster, 531 pp., £30, August 2023, 978 1 5011 8066 8
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... drive; he didn’t do email; he didn’t answer the phone; and, with the exception of a few Martin Scorsese films, he didn’t go to the movies. He didn’t see many plays beside his own. He stuck to his last. His mind was more or less in a perpetual reverie about finding and wrangling his stories. By his own calculation, he spent about three ...

Diary

Patricia Lockwood: When I Met the Pope, 30 November 2023

... I streak around later. I have a brief moment of panic. Is it wrong to meet the pope? Then: if Martin Scorsese did it, it’s probably fine.The photographer Andres Serrano is tall and his look is pastoral. His colour is mild and his eyes look like two skips of a stone across the water. This is not true in pictures but it is true in person. He walks ...

All That Gab

James Wolcott: The Upsides of Sontag’s Downsides, 24 October 2019

Sontag: Her Life 
by Benjamin Moser.
Allen Lane, 832 pp., £30, September 2019, 978 0 241 00348 0
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... scrambling movie decade that gave us Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, there was nary a murmur from her (just imagine what she might have made of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). We know from Nunez and others that Sontag boogied in Studio 54, and yet where was her disco inferno deep-think? Disco as tribal ...

Do Anything, Say Anything

James Meek: On the New TV, 4 January 2024

Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust and Lies that Broke Television 
by Peter Biskind.
Allen Lane, 383 pp., £25, November, 978 0 241 44390 3
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... the movies, and in those days the movies looked down on TV from a great height. (In 2007, when Martin Scorsese agreed to direct the pilot of HBO’s Boardwalk Empire, it transpired that the director of Goodfellas had never watched The Sopranos.) Besides, whereas in film, as Biskind puts it, ‘writers are often treated like scum, television is a ...

In the Opposite Direction

David Blackbourn: Enzensberger, 25 March 2010

The Silences of Hammerstein 
by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, translated by Martin Chalmers.
Seagull, 465 pp., £20, 1 906497 22 2
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... with his interlocutor’s recording machine. Here the ‘posthumous conversations’, as Martin Chalmers has it, raise other questions. In one Hammerstein says: ‘If it had been up to me, I would already have fired on the Nazis in August 1932.’ What he actually said was: ‘If the National Socialists come to power legally, that is acceptable to ...

No flourish was too much

Bridget Alsdorf: Out-Tissoted, 13 August 2020

James Tissot 
by Melissa Buron et al.
Prestel, 354 pp., £55, October 2019, 978 3 7913 5919 9
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... In Martin Scorsese​ ’s film adaptation of The Age of Innocence, facsimiles of James Tissot’s paintings hang on the walls of the Beauforts’ Gilded Age mansion, the setting for the annual Opera Ball, where New York plutocrats dance with women in Tissot-inspired dresses. An oversized replica of Too Early (1873) shows the sniggering that meets a group of early arrivals at a ball ...

The Person in the Phone Booth

David Trotter: Phone Booths, 28 January 2010

... booth glows faintly behind Anna, in the depth of the shot, as she paces restlessly up and down. In Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), fantasist Rupert Pupkin (Robert De Niro), on a first date with barmaid Rita (Diahnne Abbott), hopes to impress her by leafing through his autograph album. It’s not long before our attention drifts away from ...

Cheerfully Chopping up the World

Michael Wood: Film theory, 2 July 1998

The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium 
by Gilberto Perez.
Johns Hopkins, 466 pp., £25, April 1998, 0 8018 5673 6
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On the History of Film Style 
by David Bordwell.
Harvard, 322 pp., £39.95, February 1998, 0 674 63428 4
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Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine 
by D.N. Rodowick.
Duke, 260 pp., £46.95, October 1997, 0 8223 1962 4
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The Aesthetics and Psychology of the Cinema 
by Jean Mitry, translated by Christopher King.
Athlone, 405 pp., £45, February 1998, 0 485 30084 2
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Signs and Meaning in the Cinema 
by Peter Wollen.
BFI, 188 pp., £40, May 1998, 0 85170 646 0
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... the vocalist makes his entry. It’s Tony Bennett singing ‘From Rags to Riches’. The film is Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990). All kinds of things are going on here, artful, intelligent, violent and ironic. The broadest effect is that of the song, with its implication of a sarcasm as old as gangster movies themselves. Organised crime is a ...

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