MikePadgett.com

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2006
• 

Scorsese has finally won a Best Director Oscar for The Departed. What a shame he didn’t win for one of his earlier and better efforts, because this one just doesn’t compare.

Look past Michael Ballhaus’ superb cinematography and Scorsese’s rich scenemaking and the big problem is the generation gap. The elders in support - Jack Nicholson, Alec Baldwin, Martin Sheen and Ray Winstone - are excellent; it’s the youthful leads that don’t cut it: Leonardo Di Caprio, Matt Damon and Mark Wahlberg. And sadly the movie is all about them.

Wahlberg is foulmouthed but irrelevant and Damon is one-dimensional (Will Hunting being a much better Southie specimen), but I’m still sitting on the fence about Di Caprio. His performances exhibit occasional flashes of magnificence, but there’s still something of that awkward youth in him and The Departed is supposed to be a movie for grown-ups.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2004
• 

The Aviator is not your typical Scorsese movie. As we open on a young Howard Hughes shooting his famously expensive Hell’s Angels, it’s hard to miss the fact that this biopic can’t have been cheap either.

The range of the movie is wide like Hughes’ flying feats. It covers his fascination for aviation of course, but also something of the mental illness from which he suffered in the later part of his life.

Leonardo Di Caprio effectively handles the trajectory of the Hughes character arc, with reasonably good support from Cate Blanchett, Kate Beckinsale and John C. Reilly. Alan Alda’s performance as Sen Brewster is particulary noteworthy. All in all a solid movie, unusually shot with bright, blue filtered light, but in the end rather too much Hollywood gloss prevents us from penetrating the darker tones of the subject’s life.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 1983
• 

Along with After Hours, The King of Comedy is one of Scorsese’s ‘forgotten movies’ and it’s his lowest grosser. That status alone adds a certain piquancy to what is certainly a unique and shadowy addition to the Scorsese oeuvre.

Robert De Niro plays Rupert Pupkin, a severely deluded but ostensibly harmless nut who’s desperate to hit the big time as a guest comedian on the talk show of his idol Jerry Langford, played with superb restraint by Jerry Lewis.

The King of Comedy is like those shrunken heads in the Pitt Rivers Museum: your curiosity draws you in, but the thing itself is toothless. Not funny enough for a comedy, not dark enough for a psycho-thriller - it’s precisely this imbalance that gives the movie its uneasy charm.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 2002
• 

Gangs Of New York follows the fortunes of Amsterdam Vallon, orphaned as a young boy by the mercurial leader of a rival gang in 19th century lower Manhattan.

The film marks the return of Leonardo DiCaprio who had given a string of pin-up roles the slip and DiCaprio’s protagonist Amsterdam Vallon is backed by a fine cast of Irish players.

Daniel Day-Lewis was persuaded by Martin Scorsese to quit his apprenticeship as a Florentine cobbler - a job he’d been doing since his self-imposed retirement from acting five years previous - and join the cast of Gangs. His picaresque performance as the formidable object of Vallon’s vengeance dominates Scorsese’s most successful period drama to date.

• Director: Martin Scorsese
• United States, 1973
• 

It’s only his third feature film, yet Mean Streets is a surprisingly mature work from Scorsese. The machine gun dialogue, the inquisitive camera, the guilt and redemption themes: it’s all there.

As with the first time I saw it years ago, I couldn’t shake off a subtle sense of the comical about the film and Scorsese certainly hasn’t pursued that side of things over the years, except perhaps in The King of Comedy (1983). The fight scene in the pool hall is golden.

And you’ll never see De Niro as animated as in Mean Streets. The youthful electricity prickling him here is extraordinary.