Happy St. Marty's Day

The legendary filmmaker turns 80 on Thursday.

(Getty Images/Sunset Boulevard)

Tomorrow is Martin Scorsese’s birthday – the living conscience of American film turns 80. (Correction, the living conscience of global film; check out the director’s personally curated DVD series for Criterion, “Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project.”) Once the motor-mouthed bad boy of the New Hollywood generation, Scorsese has improbably evolved into his medium’s elder statesman, and a controversial one at that, earning the fury of the fanboys with his 2019 comment that superhero movies were more like theme parks than cinema. (An eloquent follow-up defense in the New York Times only fanned the flames.)