There’s a moment in Martin Scorsese Directs, the 1990 American Masters episode on the filmmaker, where a gaggle of talking heads wax poetic about their friend and colleague’s encyclopedic knowledge of movies … You can see Scorsese noticeably bristle before replying: “Yeah, sure, I know a lot about cinema history. So what? Don’t I have opinions about life, death, love, hate, sin, salvation?” … Rebecca Miller, an extraordinary storyteller in own right … seems to have taken the message to heart. Divided into a quintet of distinct chapters and covering everything from Scorsese’s formative years on the mean streets of downtown Manhattan to prepping his 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, this marathon-length look at a true American master has its share of best-in-show highlight reels … But it never loses sight of the man behind the movie camera, paying close attention to the good, the bad, and the ugly of his life while giving him plenty of space to reflect on all of it. It is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the definitive look at our greatest living filmmaker … The standard beats of his backstory, well-known to even the most casual fans, are there in full, as dutifully visited as the stations of the cross: LES to NYU, the Corman apprenticeship, the literal highs (and health lows) of the cocaine years, the comeback from the brink of death, the coronation as “the Mob-movie guy,” the evolution of going from angry young man to still-very-angry middle-aged man to elder statesman of cinema … That last part is ultimately what separates Mr. Scorsese from the other admirable docu-portraits done on this veteran filmmaker: the emphasis on the who and the why behind those creative expressions as much as the when, where, and how … Mr. Scorsese is an artist who’s always had something to say about the world he sees around all of us. Mr. Scorsese lets you enter into a conversation with him about that for five hours. The only thing wrong with this endeavor is that it’s not twice as long.

David Fear, ‘Mr. Scorsese’ Is the Definitive Portrait of Our Greatest Living Filmmaker, “Rolling Stones”, 18 October 2025