This account of American films is balanced between subjective enthusiasm and objective analysis. Scorsese starts from his own childhood love affair with the cinema, when he discovered King Vidor's Dual in the Sun as a boy.

Collected interviews with the man who has been called the greatest living American film director

With Richard Schickel as the canny and intelligent guide, these conversations take us deep into Scorsese's life and work. He reveals which films are most autobiographical, and what he was trying to explore and accomplish in other films.

Academy Award–winning director Martin Scorsese is one of the most significant American filmmakers in the history of cinema. Although best known for his movies about gangsters and violence, such as Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and Taxi Driver, Scorsese has addressed a much wider range of themes and topics in the four decades of his career. In The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, an impressive cast of contributors explores the complex themes and philosophical underpinnings of Martin Scorsese’s films. The essays concerning Scorsese’s films about crime and violence investigate the nature of friendship, the ethics of vigilantism, and the nature of unhappiness. The authors delve deeply into the minds of Scorsese’s tortured characters and explore how the men and women he depicts grapple with moral codes and their emotions. Several of the essays explore specific themes in individual films. The authors describe how Scorsese addresses the nuances of social mores and values in The Age of Innocence, the nature of temptation and self-sacrifice in The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, and the complexities of innovation and ambition in The Aviator. Other chapters in the collection examine larger philosophical questions. In a world where everything can be interpreted as meaningful, Scorsese at times uses his films to teach audiences about the meaning in life beyond the everyday world depicted in the cinema. For example, his films touching on religious subjects, such as Kundun and The Last Temptation of Christ, allow the director to explore spiritualism and peaceful ways of responding to the chaos in the world.Filled with penetrating insights on Scorsese’s body of work, The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese shows the director engaging with many of the most basic questions about our humanity and how we relate to one another in a complex world.

Roger Ebert wrote the first film review that director Martin Scorsese ever received - for 1967's I Call First, later renamed Who's That Knocking at My Door - creating a lasting bond that made him one of Scorsese's most appreciative and perceptive commentators. Scorsese by Ebert offers the first record of America's most respected film critic's en...

Martin Scorsese (USA, born 1942) is among the most prolific of American directors, having made more than 25 features in a 40-year career that has seen him garner all the highest honours the film world can bestow. He is admired and respected throughout the world for the tireless work of his Film Foundation in preserving America's film heritage.

From the urban violence and psychosis of MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, and GOODFELLAS to the romanticism of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, and from the drama of RAGING BULL to the supremely provocative LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, this book provides a "lively, informative look at the 'consummate cineast, ' whom Steven Spielberg calls America's best and most honest director" (LIBRARY JOURNAL).

Martin Scorsese's current position in the international film community is unrivaled, and his name has become synonymous with the highest standards of filmmaking excellence. He is widely considered America's best living film director, and his Taxi Driver and Raging Bull appear frequently on worldwide surveys of the best films of all time. Here, in the first biographical account of this artist's life, Vincent LoBrutto traces Scorsese's Italian-American heritage, his strict Catholic upbringing, the continuing role of religion in his life and art, his obsessive love of cinema history, and the powerful impact that the streets of New York City had on his personal life and his professional career. Meanwhile, the filmmaker's humble, soft-spoken public persona tells only part of the story, and LoBrutto will delve into the other side of a complex and often tortured personality. Scorsese's intense passion, his private relationships, his stormy marriages, and his battles with drugs and depression are all chronicled here, and, in many cases, for the first time. In addition, the book includes an interview with the director, as well as filmographies cataloging his work as a director, producer, actor, and presenter. As his Best Director award at the 2007 Oscars clearly demonstrated, Scorsese has become something like Hollywood royalty in recent years, finally enjoying the insider status and favor that eluded him for most of his career. But these recent developments aside, Scorsese is also notable as a distinctly American type of artist, one whose work-created in a medium largely controlled by commercialism and marketing-has always been unmistakably his own, and who thus remains a touchstone of artistic integrity in American cinema. In Martin Scorsese: A Biography, readers can examine not only the work of one of the form's genuine artists, but also the forces that have propelled the man behind it.

Scorsese and Religion explores and analyzes the religious vision of filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s oeuvre, showing that Scorsese cannot be properly understood without reflecting on the ways that his religious interests are expressed in and through his art.