Martin Scorsese
707 connections found
Filmography
Casino 1995 
Shutter Island 2010 
Raging Bull 1980 
The Last Waltz 1978 
Mean Streets 1973 
Taxi Driver 1976 
GoodFellas 1990 
Cape Fear 1991 
The Wolf of Wall Street 2013 
Who's That Knocking at My Door 1968 
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore 1974 
Boxcar Bertha 1972 
The Departed 2006 
The Aviator 2004 
The King of Comedy 1982 
After Hours 1985 
The Irishman 2019 
Gangs of New York 2002 
Hugo 2011 
Bringing Out the Dead 1999 
The Last Temptation of Christ 1988 
New York, New York 1977 
New York Stories 1989 
The Color of Money 1986 
Kundun 1997 
The Age of Innocence 1993 
Shine a Light 2008 
The Key to Reserva 2007 
The Big Shave 1967 
Public Speaking 2011 
Italianamerican 1974 
Killers of the Flower Moon 2023 
American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince 1978 
Silence 2016 
The Audition 2015 View:
Connections, in both directions
The Green Knight (2021)
Directed by David Lowery
influenced by The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Themes Visuals
These intriguing questions are enough to hold one’s interest in the absence of physical forward motion, and, before long, our man finds himself at his true destination, whereupon he more fully wrestles with the very concepts that launched him on his journey — dubious motivations that inspire meditations on nothing less than the meaning of life — via a sequence reminiscent of the penultimate stretch in The Last Temptation of Christ .
While the poem concludes in a joyful reversal that reflects the spiritual renewal of the New Year, the filmmaker opts for a more sober and uncertain ending that evokes no less a film than The Last Temptation of Christ (1988).
Lowery, never shy about wearing influences on his sleeve, borrows a little from both, while nodding also to the controversial revisionism of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and to the allegorical dread (and talking fox!) of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist .
Lowery presents this theme with such an assured hand that comparisons can be made to Terrence Malick’s A Hidden Life (2019) and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), in which a character struggles to embrace their morals in the face of overwhelming adversity.
Lowery attempts an equally audacious movement here–a full fifteen minutes without dialogue, spanning decades in an amazing homage to “The Last Temptation Of Christ.”
He imagines the life he might have had (like Willem Dafoe’s Jesus in “The Last Temptation of Christ”).
“Dheepan” pulls its poverty-stricken characters together only to atomize the community in a bloody climax that’s cinematic as hell yet dramatically unconvincing, as though a finely observed fable had decided to go out with a “Taxi Driver” bang.
Audiard rejects a more reasonable ending in favor of a slate-clearing, Taxi Driver -inspired climax, which pointlessly fringes into fantasy territory.
…by Bill Chambers "Well, not exactly," a critic acquaintance gently scoffed after I shrugged that Dheepan was "y'know, Taxi Driver."
The drift towards a violent, cathartic showdown, with echoes of Death Wish and Taxi Driver, sits uneasily with what has gone before but provides a suitably dramatic finale to a solid and engrossing Audiard drama.
For director Jacques Audiard to snag his industry's greatest prize for "Dheepan" instead of his greater earlier efforts, "The Beat that My Heart Skipped" and "A Prophet," is roughly tantamount to Martin Scorsese landing the Best Director Oscar for "The Departed" instead of "Taxi Driver" or "Goodfellas."
Early word of mouth even compared it to Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976) in both atmosphere and in its explosive third-act climax of visceral violence.
Southpaw (2015)
Directed by Antoine Fuqua
influenced by Raging Bull (1980), Taxi Driver (1976)
Visuals Plot
It has the over-the-top brutality of “Raging Bull,” without matching Martin Scorsese’s artistry.
While lacking the grace and ethereal beauty of the matches in “Raging Bull,” “Southpaw” comes off pretty much as the real thing.
Although there are plenty of echoes of past boxing films, from the grit of Raging Bull to the heart of The Champ (both versions) as well as the Rocky pics , Champion, Somebody Up There Likes Me and others, this movie has a beating heart of its own.
Think Rocky rather than Raging Bull, and don’t spend time wondering how soon screenwriters Kurt Sutter (TV’s Sons of Anarchy) and Richard Wenk (The Mechanic) will reference The Great White Hope.
Of course, how that idea gets executed is what makes the difference between Raging Bull and Grudge Match .
Put more simply, there’s a lot of punching in “Southpaw,” which combines the training narrative from “Rocky,” the visceral ringside energy of “Raging Bull” and the rank melodrama of “Million Dollar Baby” to make something, if not new, then at least stylish in its derivativeness.
The Sitter (2011)
Directed by David Gordon Green
influenced by After Hours (1985)
Plot Visuals Themes
Find out why Jonah Hill's mashup of Adventures in Babysitting and After Hours really needs to sit on it.
You can tell that David Gordon Green was emulating Martin Scorsese's "After Hours" more than "Adventures in Babysitting," as the movie gets wilder and darker, but often times opportunities for conflict are merely forgotten about or easily dismissed as the film races towards the finish line.
It recalls its genre antecedents (think After Hours and Adventures in Babysitting) in concept – here, Jonah Hill plays a reluctant babysitter lugging three kids in a minivan through Brooklyn while dodging a sulky drug dealer (Sam Rockwell) – but never gets at the same itchy spirit of anarchy.
At the upper end of the form is Scorsese's After Hours; at the bottom is the Tina Fey-Steve Carell vehicle Date Night, which is now joined by The Sitter .
Clearly hankering for a taste of gumball, he packs the kids into the minivan and before you can say "After Hours" or "Adventures in Babysitting" or "Date Night," he becomes embroiled in one misadventure after another involving a fey-but-psychotic drug dealer (Sam Rockwell), angry black people, stolen cars, explosions, a crashed bat mitzvah, corrupt cops, missing drugs, a nice girl and firecrackers to the crotch.
"After Hours," "Risky Business," "Something Wild," "Into The Night"… these are movies I adore because of that feeling of a world that we rarely glimpse that suddenly washes over these unsuspecting characters.
The concept seems based on the idea that it might be funny to see Will Ferrell as a suburban dad do a take on Robert De Niro in “Casino,” with ostentatious sunglasses, gory violence and all.
When he approached Ferrell with the idea for a comedy in which a dorky dad morphs into the mobster Robert De Niro played in Casino — complete with oversize shades — the star was good-hearted enough to do the up-and-comer a solid.
In particular, a series of weird references riffing on the old Scorsese-De Niro classic Casino lifts The House out of many a potential flat spot.
Also: homages to “Casino” and “Terminator,” a surprising amount of blood and a Jeremy Renner cameo (those last two are related, natch).
Partnered with their gambling-addicted neighbour, Frank (the drily hysterical Jason Mantzoukas), they turn a McMansion into a gambling den, allowing them to exploit their friends and neighbours and indulge in comic homages to Martin Scorsese's Las Vegas classic Casino that comes with bursts of unexpected violence.
• Scott and Kate turning into mobster-wannabes inspired by Scorsese’s “Casino.”
You Were Never Really Here (2017)
Directed by Lynne Ramsay
influenced by Taxi Driver (1976)
Themes Plot Visuals Characters
And if nothing else, you can spend its running time recalling better movies it seems to pay tribute to — Taxi Driver, Hardcore, Mona Lisa, The Professional, Oldboy, Drive.
Focusing on a self-appointed vigilante out to save a young girl from the dark underbelly of new York, You Were Never Really Here will inevitably be compared to Taxi Driver, but, while many films have tried and failed to match the achievement of Scorsese’s early masterpiece, this one is good enough to earn the comparison.In both films, the lead performance is key.
It’s a nerve-shredding, artsploitation action picture, with Ramsay mixing and matching elements of Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” and John Boorman’s “Point Blank” to create something audaciously all her own.
There are many parallels between Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
The collision of sex trafficking and politics spells do-or-die stakes for all involved, and Joe’s maddening underworld descent into the very worst of human nature, where violence is the only language that matters, recalls Paul Schrader’s scripts for Taxi Driver and Hardcore.
Samsonov, whose role (especially paired with Phoenix’s) recalls Jodie Foster’s in “Taxi Driver,” is a heartbreaking Nina, bonded with Joe via PTSD.
Hustlers (2019)
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
influenced by GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), The Departed (2006)
Themes Visuals Plot
There are shades of the wit and grit of Scorsese's Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street but Scafaria combines it with a refreshingly sincere approach, akin to Steven Soderbergh's Magic Mike .
Scafaria (“Seeking a Friend at the End of the World”) has studied the Martin Scorsese playbook perfectly, and there’s a distinct “Wolf of Wall Street”/“GoodFellas” vibe to the accumulation of money, furs and Louis Vuitton bags.
Hustlers cuts back and forth between the past and the present (there is also narration and an elaborate long take around the entire strip club reminiscent of the tracking camera work in Goodfellas, just to further drive the Martin Scorsese comparisons home), but it should be obvious to anyone reading this review that eventually someone does blow this up into a scandal.
Indeed, Hustlers feels akin to the crime films of both Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas, Casino) and Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice).
Todd Banhazl’s cinematography, which snakes and dashes and zooms around this pre-2008 crash excess, recalls the virtuosic, cocksure visuals we associate with Martin Scorsese’s kinetic studies in greed ( Goodfellas , Casino , The Wolf of Wall Street ).
Playing a scheming stripper who rips off men and barely bats an eyelash, Jennifer Lopez has her best role since "Out of Sight" in "Hustlers," a seductive crime drama that's like "Goodfellas" with stripper poles.
American Made (2017)
Directed by Doug Liman
influenced by GoodFellas (1990), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Casino (1995)
Plot Themes Dialogue
Spinelli clearly is crazy about Scorsese’s “GoodFellas,” and he has structured “American Made” in roughly the same picaresque fashion.
On those superficial levels, it probably does deserve some comparison to such classics as “Goodfellas,” “Casino” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.”
It seems to want to be Goodfellas and it’s not that monumental, but citizens should know about the shady schemes in which its government agencies were involved.
Delivering the kind of arsenic wit we haven’t seen since “Goodfellas,” it explores a world where good and evil exist not only side by side, but usually hand in hand.
It shows its references, a combination of “Goodfellas,” “Blow” and “Scarface,” but never achieves the internal consistency of those films.
The slick surface of American Made largely plays like another variation on the rags-to-riches-to-crash-and-burn trajectory of movies like Scarface and Goodfellas, with a healthy helping of flexible history, a la American Hustle.
War Dogs (2016)
Directed by Todd Phillips
influenced by GoodFellas (1990), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Mean Streets (1973), Raging Bull (1980)
Themes Visuals Plot
When War Dogs grows up, it really, really wants to be Goodfellas.
“War Dogs” plays like a movie made by someone who has spent a life in cinematic isolation, watching nothing but “The Big Short” and “Goodfellas” on a constant loop.
Then he’s looking up at the barrel of a loaded gun, and the screen freezes, “Goodfellas” style, and off we go with the flashbacks and the darkly comedic stuff set to classic rock tunes, and more freeze-frame moments used as devices for the narrator to introduce various colorful characters along the way.
A movie like War Dogs makes a pretty strong case that, outside of perhaps Pulp Fiction, no film from the last thirty years has been as influential—or just straight-up copied— as Goodfellas.
Okay, then: “War Dogs” is “Goodfellas,” but with none of that film’s pulse, anthropological detail or seductive immediacy: It’s “Whoa, dude-fellas.”
99 Homes, The Social Network, Scarface and Goodfellas are a few of the movies that have used this story in more interesting ways than War Dogs.
Black Mass (2015)
Directed by Scott Cooper
influenced by GoodFellas (1990), The Departed (2006), Casino (1995)
Themes Characters Plot
Comparisons to the films of Martin Scorsese are inevitable (and apparently obligatory), but while Goodfellas and Casino evoke a time and a place through their characters and events Cooper’s latest evokes nothing more than a reminder that Depp is a fantastic actor when he wants to be.
Black Mass is more The Departed than Goodfellas — Jack Nicholson’s mobster in the former actually was inspired by Bulger.
Without revealing too much, let’s just say that his sinister, is-he-kidding-or-isn’t-he demeanor immediately recalls Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.
Based on Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill's book, Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance between the FBI and the Irish Mob, the film borrows heavily from Scorsese's Goodfellas and The Departed, though Scott Cooper's film definitely has its moments.
Trying to match up against Goodfellas , Casino or The Departed isn’t the smartest move if you can’t at least match those all-time classics and Black Mass comes up way short.
There is a sensuality in his evilness, like that of a vampire, and even a theatricality not unlike Joe Pesci’s gangster in “Goodfellas.”
American Hustle (2013)
Directed by David O. Russell
influenced by GoodFellas (1990), Casino (1995), After Hours (1985), The King of Comedy (1982), Raging Bull (1980)
Visuals Plot
(Its surreal level of energy, akin to that of “Goodfellas,” makes for one of the few valid reasons to compare Russell’s romp to any work by Scorsese.)
American Hustle seems to be getting compared to Goodfellas , but I see it more in the vein of Ocean’s Eleven .
Call it a rip-off or call it an homage, but let’s call it what it is: Goodfellas and Casino cut with Donnie Brasco ’s bromance and Boogie Nights ’ ’70s fetishism.
Further complicating it all are the con man's mercurial wife (Jennifer Lawrence from The Hunger Games, deftly shooting insults instead of arrows) and the mayor of Camden, N.J. (Jeremy Renner, his hair channeling Joe Pesci's in Goodfellas), a basically decent man ensnared by the scam.
Unlike Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990), a film to which American Hustle is being compared, Russell’s film never breaks through the razzle-dazzle of the surface.
Reminiscent of the panoramic sweep of Scorsese epics like Goodfellas and Casino (with a dash of Paul Thomas Anderson’s equally ’70s-retro Boogie Nights thrown in as well), American Hustle incorporates occasional voiceover and familiar period-specific song choices on the soundtrack to evoke an era but also give a grandness to the story.
Observe and Report (2009)
Directed by Jody Hill
influenced by Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1982)
Themes Plot Characters
Regardless, Jody Hill’s comic twist on “Taxi Driver” hardened Rogen’s onscreen heart and Hanna-Barbera face for his most unexpected performance.
Plenty of people have already compared the film to Taxi Driver , and there seems to be no reason not to add to the pile; Hill's film is similar enough to Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader that it would be hard to believe that it wasn't his intent from the outset.
In a script that was reportedly inspired by “Taxi Driver,” Seth Rogen gives the best performance of his career to date as Ronnie Barnhardt, a bipolar mall security guard with serious mental issues.
Comparisons to “Taxi Driver” are quite apt, with Hill and Rogen instilling Ronnie with the same soufflé of psychosis that created an iconic screen antihero in Travis Bickle.
With admirably funkiness and bold flavor, Hill has made the anti-Blart...but at a time when we've seen seven mass shootings in a month, do we really need the comedy version of Taxi Driver?
He must be unhinged and pitiable, frightening and funny, morally repellent and yet identifiably human, something like Robert DeNiro's Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy.
Good Time (2017)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced by After Hours (1985), Taxi Driver (1976), Mean Streets (1973), Raging Bull (1980), Bringing Out the Dead (1999), The Departed (2006)
Visuals Themes Plot
Even before the knowingly retro typography of the opening titles kicks in, it’s clear that the sweaty urgency of 1970s New Hollywood — in particular, such hard-headed urban dramas as “Dog Day Afternoon” and “Taxi Driver” — is a key point of reference for the Safdies here.
I could say that “Good Time” looks like a movie that Martin Scorsese would have made around that time, pre-”Taxi Driver,” and that is intended as high praise.
The mise-en-scène evokes the feverishly lit, mysterious nighttime scenes and dread-ridden days of the defining ’70s cinematic era of urban psychodramas that included the likes of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon.
Think Death Wish, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, The French Connection.
The Safdies are aiming for sensory overload, taking a classic genre of New York moviemaking (following “one crazy night,” like Martin Scorsese’s After Hours) and turning it into the ultimate bad trip.
What follows plays out like a drug cocktail of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours and a Michael Mann-directed acid trip.
Shock Corridor (1963)
Directed by Samuel Fuller
influenced Shutter Island (2010)
Visuals Themes Plot
Watching it, movie references pile up inside your brain: Samuel Fuller's Shock Corridor is in there, certainly, and the cheapo tone poems of the B-movie master Val Lewton.
Grad-level geeks will also recognize the references to Sam Fuller's Shock Corridor, Vincente Minnelli's The Cobweb, and Val Lewton's Isle of the Dead.
It's also an homage to Shock Corridor, a film made by one of his idols, Sam Fuller.
With the creepy and atmospheric “Shutter Island,” the 67-year-old Scorsese cuts a few new notches into his belt: not only is it an adaptation of a bestseller (by Dennis Lehane, who also wrote “Mystic River” and “Gone Baby Gone”), a first for the director, but it’s a mystery-laced-with-psychiatry film, in the vein of “Spellbound,” “The Snake Pit,” “Shock Corridor,” “The Green Mile” or even “The Silence of the Lambs.”
For this distinction, Scorsese hardly needed to have directed Shutter Island, his first movie to fully institutionalize this conditionâ??or, if you prefer, his first to wrestle with the psychoanalytic and insane asylum subgenres, within which Samuel Fullerâ??s Shock Corridor is but the most obvious entry.
In Samuel Fuller 's "Shock Corridor" (1963), an obvious influence on "Shutter Island," the reporter's lover tells him he's crazy to enter the asylum in the name of a good story.
True, it still doesn’t make “The Third Man” as great as history remembers it, but without Carol Reed's classic 1949 noir, we wouldn’t have films like “ Chinatown ” or “ The Departed ."
He adds impish visual touches such as silent movie-style iris shots, as well as cuts and compositions recalling "The Third Man" and "Psycho."
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. these give the film its tone, its feeling, its weightiness quite apart from their more overt symbolic value.
Another, deftly borrowed from The Third Man, simply involves Madolyn walking past Colin at a funeral, her impassive gaze deadlier than a speeding bullet.
The aforementioned scene, the use of the Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" (significantly, from their Let It Bleed album), the reference to the Stones' Exile on Main Street, the evocation of Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949), the nod to the "X" imagery from Howard Hawks' Scarface (1932), etc. ?
He loves to toss into "The Departed" a homage to a film like "The Third Man," to give audiences a reference point about things that please him.
The Smashing Machine (2025)
Directed by Benny Safdie
influenced by Raging Bull (1980)
Themes Visuals
Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull and Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine depict this in two different sports and eras, but they come to a similar conclusion: masculinity is a performance.
One senses Safdie wishes to make something closer to the psychological devastation of Raging Bull…
…rather than the evocative and intimate close-ups that have defined masterworks like Raging Bull…
If you’re thinking about pugilists like LaMotta (of RAGING BULL) fame or Muhammad Ali, then you’re in a different arena.
From its opening scenes, Safdie appears to be reaching for the harrowing psychological intensity of films like Raging Bull or Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher.
…like Raging Bull, it finds simple, poetic beauty in the ring…
He also infuses numerous scenes with echoes of famous silent films: Harold Lloyd dangling precariously from a clockface in Safety Last! (1923) is recreated when Hugo must climb onto the giant clock outside the station to avoid being discovered by the Station Inspector, and while a dream sequence in which Hugo sees a spectacular train crash is based on the famous 1895 derailment of the Granville–Paris Express, it also echoes the early cinema’s obsession with trains, whether they be arriving in stations, purposefully colliding, or functioning as vehicles for the camera to capture a direct view of the onrushing scenery.
Isabelle has never been allowed to see movies so Hugo decides to fix that and sneaks her into a showing of the film, Safety Last!, famous for its scene of Harold Lloyd dangling from a giant clock face.
The extended thrill sequence builds to one of the silent cinema’s most iconic images, as Lloyd dangles from the hands of the store’s clock, his life spared by the machinations of time (a flashbulb moment sufficiently resonant to anchor the promotional campaign for Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” some 90 years later).
Safety Last! is the movie that contains the infamous clock scene, tributed by Back to the Future and recently in Martin Scorsese’s wonderful silent-film love letter Hugo, and it stands as Lloyd’s best-known movie.
There are passing tributes to Buster Keaton (seen in a beautifully restored clip from The General ) and Harold Lloyd (whose famous dangling stunt work in the 1923 Safety Last! is echoed in a scene featuring Hugo in peril high atop the station clock tower).
The film is full of visual spectacle, from the towering citadel of the station's main clock with a panoramic view of the City of Lights (where Hugo has a harrowing climb to hide from Gustav that echoes the iconic image of Harold Lloyd dangling from hand of a clock in Safety Last!) to the courtyard of the toy maker's home guarded by statues of cloaked figure.
If James Toback's petty-criminal tale "Fingers" inspired Jacques Audiard's previous "The Beat That My Heart Skipped," it's Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" that looms over his latest "A Prophet."
Think "GoodFellas," but with Gauloises and accent aigu instead of plates of spaghetti and accent Pesci.
Directed and co-written by Jacques Audiard ("The Beat That My Heart Skipped"), "A Prophet" is a gritty, passionate, magnificently crafted film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as "The Godfather," "GoodFellas" and "Gomorrah."
A Prophet has been compared to American TV series like Oz for its episodic plot and large cast, but it’s more like a Gallic Goodfellas: thoroughly absorbing, exciting, even poetic.
The film has been compared to The Godfather; its depiction of a youth of decidedly non-royal lineage working his way up the underworld ladder is, in fact, much closer to Goodfellas, and in one rock-accompanied, hyperbolically edited passage, Audiard pays homage to Scorsese’s mastery of the moment when things spin out of control.
The film that follows is as ambitious a crime saga as Goodfellas or perhaps even The Godfather, but condensed into the few years of Malik's sentence.
Nightcrawler (2014)
Directed by Dan Gilroy
influenced by Taxi Driver (1976), The King of Comedy (1982), Mean Streets (1973), Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Visuals Characters
While Taxi Driver is a clear influence (there's even an allusion to De Niro's mirror scenes), Lou doesn't develop into a ruthlessly opportunistic go-getter; he starts out that way.
As shot by Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood,” “Michael Clayton”), the directorial debut of screenwriter Dan Gilroy (“The Bourne Legacy”) makes the low-to-the-ground desert city look like a parallel to the hellish landscapes of 1970s New York City in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.”
Gyllenhaal’s creepazoid theatrics are superficially amusing (he plays every interaction like Travis’ “Henry Krinkle” conversation with the Secret Service agent in Taxi Driver, right down to the icky fake smile) but leave the viewer at a safe reserve.
You are likely to hear some comparisons to “Taxi Driver” bantered about in reference to “Nightcrawler,” but Louis Bloom is a wholly original nightmare who doesn’t transform over the course of the film, but instead settles comfortably into a niche we have carved out for him.
Bloom is more akin to the sociopaths in Taxi Driver and Peeping Tom.
Louis Bloom isn’t an iconic and righteous anti-hero like Ryan Gosling’s Driver or Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver,” though – he’s the Hannibal Lecter of the TV-news satire, the kind of guy who’s fascinating from afar, but you’d never want to tango with him.
He borrows liberally from film noir and conventional horror, synthesizing a result that at times recalls the way in which Stanley Kubrick approached The Shining .
Unsure of what kind of film it wants to be?if Scorsese was out to scare in the same way Stanley Kubrick did with 1980's " The Shining ," he has failed miserably?"Shutter…
It reminds a great deal, in fact, of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , in that there's definitely something there, but what that something might be has very little conversation with what might have been.
I appreciate the comment about Kubrick’s The Shining being a significant point of reference, and the mention of Geoffery Cock’s thesis about the film’s subtext being rooted in the holocaust.
The movie plays like a loopy fever-dream Scorsese had after a marathon of Hitchcocks Vertigo, Val Lewtons Bedlam, Kubricks The Shining, and William Peter Blattys The Ninth Configuration.
Indeed, acting more Kubrickian than ever, the director (who also co-produced the film) uses the promise of horrorâ??of another Cape Fear, reallyâ??to subvert expectations as thoroughly as did The Shining, wherein Kubrick offered nothing terribly supernatural besides the twin horrors of parenthood and writerâ??s block.