That was my first encounter with Martin Scorsese, a director who shaped my teenage and early adult years. Possibly the greatest American filmmaker, Scorsese is incapable of making uninteresting films, thus defining his 10 best films would be a fool’s task. In curating these titles, it's less a question of greatness, but rather selecting the titles that I believe surmise Scorsese, the artist and person.
What is there left to say about Casablanca? It is a testament to performances mixed with a daring screenplay that resonates with audiences both during World War II and 80 years later. The love story between Rick and Ilsa is iconic in large part due to Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman’s on-screen chemistry. It is a story about love and loss, but to label it romantic would be a mischaracterization.
The much-admired (and emulated) Martin Scorsese, for one, is an outstanding auteur and easily one of the best directors working today, yet he cannot rightly be ranked alongside the titans of the golden years when cinema was emerging as a serious art form: Akira Kurosawa, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Renoir, and the list goes on. These masters were, and remain, larger-than-life legends.
The groundbreaking exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, explores the far-reaching and everyday ways in which Black artists portrayed modern life. Through some 160 works of painting, sculpture, photography, film, and ephemera, the new Black culture was taking shape.
Many service workers have come to depend on gratuities to earn a living. Squeezing a tip out of a customer before the meal is served or under the watchful eye of your server is hardly the fault of the employee. But the employees are likely to pay for these misguided policies.
