For decades now there has been a routine to the release of a new Martin Scorsese film (or ‘picture’, as he somewhat quaintly still likes to call them). First it plays at a film festival where fanboy film critics fall over each other to heap praise upon its cinephile-friendly visual references and its “layers” and explain that it’s not really a film about x, it’s a film about y.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s 2006’s The Departed (which The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called “his best picture since GoodFellas”) or 2019’s The Irishman (which The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw called “his best picture since GoodFellas”): by the time most people get to see any new Scorsese film they have been bludgeoned into submission by posters collapsing under the weight of five star reviews, convinced themselves that an over-three-hours run time must automatically mean epic rather than bloated and got excited about the greatest living director’s latest and maybe – just maybe! – greatest.
