Martin Scorsese has never shied away from the fact that he is a Catholic, and that his religion oftentimes informs his work. There are few places where it’s more overt than in the two films we cover this week.
First we have 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ, which portrays a side of Jesus (Willem Dafoe) that many of us suspected he had, but most of which is never portrayed in the Bible. Roughly the last third of the film gives us a “what if” scenario that had a lot of religious conservatives up in arms for awhile–and that was before anyone had even seen the film.
From there we jump forward to 2016 (and from the first century AD to the seventeenth), for Silence, starring Andrew Garfield, Adam Driver and Liam Neeson. It’s not an especially famous title in the Scorsese catalog, at least not to the casual movie fan, but it’s a powerful piece of work that will have you questioning your faith and that of the characters in the film.
COMING ATTRACTIONS:
Episode 36 is the first in a series of episodes featuring films that critics seem to think you can like one or the other but not both. Well, we argue that you can, indeed, like both, and we show you why. We start with a pair of Westerns: beginning with 1952’s High Noon, and then it’s on to 1959’s Rio Bravo. The plots are similar enough to echo one another, but you won’t think “remake” when you see the second film.