Cape Fear (1991)

#22 in my ranking of Martin Scorsese's films. It seems like most directors want to make a tribute to Hitchcock at some point in their careers. Zemeckis did it with What Lies Beneath, and even the original Cape Fear by J. Lee Thompson was an homage to the then living master. Scorsese comes along and…

Advertisement

The Terminator

#2 in my ranking of the Terminator franchise. This is a testament to the power of craft in building a movie. Made inexpensively but never feeling cheap, James Cameron's first full directing credit (he worked a grand four production days on his first credited directing job, Piranha II: The Spawning) has the kind of polish…

Goodfellas

#7 in my ranking of Martin Scorsese's films. I've often wondered at the popularity of certain films based on my own personal model of storytelling. In my model, there are four major elements of storytelling (character, plot, style, and theme) which every story contains in different amounts. Part of taste is based on preferences for…

The Color of Money

#19 in my ranking of Martin Scorsese's films. Where Martin Scorsese took the sports movie in the direction of a dark, character driven exercise of personal exploration in Raging Bull, he takes the genre in a more conventional direction in The Color of Money. The sequel to The Hustler, made 25 years after the original,…

The Hustler

I love the feeling of a well-adapted novel to film. Scenes have breathing room and the traditional three act structure of a movie gets abandoned for a greater focus on character rather than plot. Even though it's an original screenplay, it's one of the reasons I love Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, which, I think, has…