Martin Scorsese: All the Films is a Must-Own for Movie Lovers (March 9, 2026)
One of my favorite coffee-table books in a very long time is now available in stores: Martin Scorsese: All the Films by Olivier Bousquet, Arnaud Devillard, and Nicolas Schaller. Admittedly, I’m biased because of my unceasing adoration of Martin Scorsese’s filmography, especially the recent post-Oscar films, which I think are deeply underrated and among the best of the new century. As Criterion is releasing “Killers of the Flower Moon” later this month and this book is now in stores, it feels like the right time to revisit Scorsese’s entire run, from the early shorts (you really need to see “Italianamerican” if you haven’t done so) through to his latest masterpiece. Scorsese is currently in production on another film. They’ll need to update this excellent volume.
All the Films covers 26 features, 17 documentaries, 7 shorts, and 4 television episodes, and it does so one at a time, treating each with equal detail. It’s one of the most notable things about the book in that the production and legacy of films like “Taxi Driver” and “GoodFellas” have been exhaustively reported over the years, but there’s certainly been significantly less written about ventures like Scorsese’s HBO show “Vinyl” or one of his many music docs, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World.”
The structure of the book opens each project with what could be called an information page, including cast, runtime, and release date, as well as more detailed info like production dates, budget, and box office. It gives the volume an almost encyclopedic quality, which can be used as a research tool if people still do that kind of thing in the age of the internet. While it may sound silly, that kind of detailed work really grounds the book in a foundation that blends both the informational and the critical. Those who look for deep critical analysis may want to look elsewhere, but anyone looking for information about the production of this incredible filmography won’t find a better one.
While the backbone of the book is the chronological reporting on Martin Scorsese’s films, the writers occasionally cut in essays, interviews, and other features out of chronological order. While that might sound haphazard, it serves to remind the reader how much of Scorsese’s work comments on itself, moving back and forth in time. So going from the “The Wolf of Wall Street” section to a feature about drug use in Scorsese’s films, particularly “GoodFellas,” feels organic and enlightening.
Of course, the book also includes wonderful production stills and behind-the-scenes photos, along with copious trivia sidebars about every single production.
As the streaming era continues to thrive, more and more people seem to be commenting on the end of physical media. I imagine coffee table books like this one have been impacted by the prevalence of information online, but what elevates Martin Scorsese: All the Films is that it’s more than just a Wikipedia-in-book-form project. It’s filled with insight, passion, and creativity. Just like its subject.
Get a copy here.
A Beautiful Day for a Neighbor: Tom Noonan (1951-2026) (March 9, 2026)
I met Tom Noonan in 2008, on the 2 train in Brooklyn, heading back into Manhattan after speaking to a film history class at Brooklyn College. There were maybe 40 people on the train, standing and sitting. I was seated on a bench near the middle of the car. Perched on a bench at the far end, on the opposite side of the aisle, writing in a notebook, was Tom Noonan. Yes, that Tom Noonan. Francis Dolarhyde in “Manhunter.” The Reaper in “The Last Action Hero.” The drug-dealing gangster Sutter Cain in “Robocop 2.”
Usually when you have a celebrity sighting, there’s a moment where you aren’t sure if it’s really that person or somebody who resembles them. I didn’t have that moment because nobody else in all of recorded history looked like Tom Noonan.
I rarely approach well-known people in public, but decided to make an exception this time because he was one of my favorite character actors—and besides, when was I going to randomly run into Tom freaking Noonan on the 2 train again?
So I walked to the end of the car, stood near his seat and said “Pardon me, sir.”
He froze for a few seconds, then looked up at me with anxious curiosity and said, “Hi?”
“Mr. Noonan,” I said, “my name is Matt Seitz. I’m a film critic. I don’t want to take up too much of your time, so I just want you to know I’ve admired your work for a long time, as both an actor and a filmmaker, and I wish you continued success.”
He was relieved. And why wouldn’t he be? Tom was not a star. But he was probably approached all the time because he was instantly recognizable and had appeared in productions that had acquired cult followings.
“Thanks,” he told me, in a noncommittal tone. Then he smiled briefly. I thought, Matt, you dummy, you should have stayed in your seat. “OK, thank you very much, for everything you do,” I said, then walked back to my seat.
Several minutes passed. Then I felt a presence. Somebody was standing over me.
I looked up, and up, and up, and up, until I saw Tom’s face, looking down at me with a curious expression.
“What did you say your name was?” he asked.
“Matt Seitz,” I said quietly, worrying I’d somehow offended him.
“Matt Zoller Seitz?” he asked.
“Uh, yeah!”
Then the train pulled into another station, the woman to my left stood up, and Tom took her seat, hunching a bit so that our eyes would be at the same level.
“You saved us in New York,” he said, grinning.
That’s how I learned that Tom had a filmmaker girlfriend (who later became his wife, 2011-2015) named Talia Lugacy, who had released an independent movie called “Descent.” It’s about a college student (Rosario Dawson) who is raped by male student and retaliates with an elaborate revenge plot that ends with a genuinely shocking punishment.. I had reviewed it the previous year for The New York Times.
“Every review was brutal,” Tom told me, “except yours. And it was for the Times! I was worried that we were dead, but that one review saved our asses.”
I asked what brought him so deep into Brooklyn. He said Talia’s father had a mechanic friend in that area who was good with cars. His needed fixing, so he’d driven it out and left it. At that time, I was living with my kids, Hannah and James, in downtown Brooklyn, which was coming up in about 15 minutes—not much time to talk. But we covered a lot of ground in that first conversation.
Tom said he lived with Talia in the East Village, in a small apartment near 4th and Bowery that he’d had for a long time. It was a very short walk from Paradise Factory, the theater he founded in 1982, which was then an abandoned hat factory. A lot of the money Tom made from film roles in the ‘80s went into renovating the building. All told, the process took five years.
As my stop came up, Tom and I exchanged email addresses. That night, I sent him a note saying how much I enjoyed talking with him and offered to contact distributors who might be interested in releasing a deluxe Blu-ray edition of What Happened Was. Alas, the ones I talked to weren’t interested. Fortunately, Oscilloscope Laboratories ultimately did release the film in 2021—a beautiful set with loads of extras.
Tom emailed me back, “I was just in the middle of regaling Talia with our long-shot meeting on the subway. So great to see you. If you’d like, I could send you a copy of ‘What Happened Was…’ on DVD – send me your address. If you’re ever in Manhattan, drop by. I’m on 4th near Bowery. Maybe bring your kids.”
I did. It was a great visit. James and Hannah (then 5 and 12, respectively) bonded with Tom and Talia, a delightful woman I’m still good friends with. I think they’d originally planned to cook dinner for us, but we drank a lot of wine and got so lost sharing stories and arguing the merits and faults of various movies that we ended up ordering pizzas instead. Then Tom told my kids the story of how we met. In this version, we were the only two people on the train, sitting on opposite ends of the car.
Each time Tom retold this story in my presence, he’d add another detail that made it spookier and more surreal. The third time I heard him tell it, there were deafening track noises and decrepit public address speakers that emitted a loud buzzing (sound effects supplied by Tom Noonan). The final time I heard him tell the story, he’d added a defective electrical system that made the overhead lights flicker. After he finished telling that version, I said, “I love how you hate being typecast as a bad guy, but every time you tell this story, it becomes more like a scene in a horror movie.” He said, “I’m a dramatist.”
There would be more conversations like this one. They were energizing and inspiring. He was a mesmerizing speaker: six feet, six inches of pale, balding, spindly-limbed magnificence, hands moving as if he were plucking words from the air like his “Heat” character did with data. Sometimes he’d have a big beard that sat on his chest like a new species of pet.
He did workshops on acting that people I know attended. They all said he was a great teacher who spoke not just to the craft elements of acting, but the complexities of existence. A few compared his classes to a kind of therapy. Same with his movies. If you worked on one of his projects in any capacity, Tom wasn’t just your boss; he was your mentor.
Tom was also a fierce champion of other artists, connecting writers with actors, actors with directors, playwrights with composers, and recommending anything a friend had done that he’d liked. He always felt that artists weren’t respected enough in this country, especially the ones who stubbornly obeyed their muses and seemed to have no interest in becoming a commodity.
In 2012, a constellation of these types gathered for Tom and Talia’s wedding in Hancock, New York, at a ramshackle farmhouse that served as Tom’s upstate retreat. Tom had affixed a geodesic dome to the main house, large enough to host a party. Nobody I asked about the dome seemed to know why Tom had it built, but there was agreement that it seemed like the kind of thing Tom Noonan would do. The ceremony began with Tom leading the guests to a riverbank, where he told the story of meeting Talia on a film set and sang her praises, blushing. Then we heard a faint drumming sound. It was coming from somewhere upriver. A speck on the water slowly grew into a canoe, gliding towards us, bearing a drummer from Zozo Afrobeat and Talia, in a white dress, standing at the prow, in a pose reminiscent of a figurehead on an ancient warship.
Rosario Dawson and the independent filmmaker Caveh Zahedi were in attendance. So was Sopranos writer-producer Todd Kessler, who cast Tom as Detective Victor Huntley on his series Damages. Tom’s old friend Rip Torn was supposed to be there, but he didn’t show up for the wedding, nor the reception, and as the night wore on, there was talk that he might not appear at all. Torn finally arrived near midnight, in a car driven by a friend, when only a handful of stragglers were left. He was so drunk he could barely stand up. But with his booming voice and satyr grin, Rip was still so charismatic that by the time word reached Tom in the dome that he had finally arrived, a small crowd had gathered around the actor, listening as he made jokes and shared off-color anecdotes. When Tom walked outside and saw Rip, he laughed and smiled and pulled him into an embrace and kissed the top of Rip’s head, which was somewhere below Tom’s Adam’s apple, and exclaimed, “I was worried!”
I was fortunate to bear witness to Tom’s protectiveness when his brother, the acclaimed playwright John Ford Noonan (A Couple of White Chicks Sitting Around Talking, Some Men Need Help), died in 2018, at an actors’ retirement home in New Jersey Tom sent me an email asking me if I could use my New York Times connections to get the paper to write an obituary for him.
“I know it would mean a lot to him and those who knew him and worked with him,” he wrote, adding, “If you need some background on John, I would be more than happy to provide it, including the history of some of his more well-known productions.” I wrote a couple of emails to people I knew at the paper, and an obituary did eventually run in the Times, though I doubt I had anything to do with it. What I took away from that exchange was the passion and sincerity with which Tom advocated for his brother to have his passing observed by the paper of record. (He gave me a copy of one of his brother’s lesser-known plays, The Critic’s Wife, saying, “I’m pretty sure you’ll like this.” He was right.)
Tom was in his ‘50s and ‘60s when I knew him, but he talked about the arts with the enthusiasm and idealism of a young student who’d just graduated and couldn’t wait to make his mark on the world. I loved that about him.
Tom’s theater was the biggest example of his dedication to doing whatever it took to produce his art, including living frugally and pouring money he earned from acting into making his own stuff. Tom would go through periods where he’d get frustrated at being offered villain roles and turn them down. He said he was in that mindset when the producers of 1993’s The Last Action Hero asked him to play The Reaper, so he turned them down. Then he heard how much they were prepared to pay him and changed his mind. The amount was enough to cover postproduction on his first film as a writer-director, 1994’s What Happened Was…, a two-character drama starring Tom and his friend Karen Sillas about an excruciatingly awkward first date, all set in the woman’s apartment.
Tom staged What Happened Was… as a play at Paradise Factory, rehearsed it for six months before starting production on the movie, then shot, on video, what he described to me as “a rough draft” at the theater. He timed every shot in the completed video so he’d know exactly how much 35mm film he’d have to buy for the movie, which was shot on a redressed version of the stage set.
What Happened Was…would go on to win both the Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival. Its success gave him enough juice to make another movie as writer-director, The Wife, in which Tom and Julie Hagerty played married therapists who did relationship counseling. The two distraught patients who show up at their home unannounced were played by Wallace Shawn and Karen Young. (Tom was married to Young from 1992 to 1999. Their union produced two children, Felix and Wanda, who had grown up in the apartment I’d soon be visiting, and now sit on the board of the Paradise.) There would be one more filmed play, Wang Dang (1998), that another friend of mine worked on as a video playback assistant, but it has never been released. Tom and Talia produced The Shape of Something Squashed at the Paradise Factory in 2013, which would turn out to be Tom’s final play-turned-film, and another that has not been released.
You may already know that Tom was also a musician, and a good one. He did the scores for his plays and films; his score for What Happened Was… is credited to the fictitious Ludovico Sorret. A Connecticut native, his dad was a jazz pianist, John Ford Noonan, Sr. We bonded over having jazz musicians as parents and talked about how that experience shaped who we became. Tom went to Yale on a basketball scholarship (unsurprising, considering his height and build) and studied medicine only to please his father. But he ended up dropping out, moving to New York City, and playing piano and guitar in bands. He also wrote music for an off-Broadway play (which later became a musical after the director fell in love with his work). While watching a performance of that play, Tom started thinking about acting, something he’d never done. He figured since he’d been playing basketball since elementary school, and was already comfortable performing in front of hundreds or thousands of people, he’d have no anxiety about going onstage in a small theater, so he took the plunge.
At a certain point during a long get-together at the apartment, Tom might leave the conversation he was involved in, walk to an electric piano located around the corner in one of the bedrooms, and begin to play. I don’t think he was seeking an audience. I think he just felt like playing at that moment, and didn’t mind if people came over to watch and listen.
My son James, who had already spent many hours listening to his grandfather play piano, stood next to the keyboard and watched Tom play a couple of his own jazz compositions. Without taking his fingers away from the keyboard, Tom asked my son, “You don’t recognize any of these, do you?”
“No,” he said.
“OK, let’s try something else,” Tom said.
And then he started playing, of all things, the theme song to “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
He even sang the lyrics.
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,
A beautiful day for a neighbor,
Would you be mine?
Would you be mine?”
Watching the man who played Francis Dolarhyde play and sing a song made famous by Fred Rogers, the closest thing to a saint that television ever had, was one of the most sublime and unexpected moments I’ve ever experienced. I’m not a person who shoots video compulsively. I’m selective about who and what I point a camera at, and I try not to treat real life as raw content for some platform. So I didn’t shoot Tom’s performance that night. Somehow, the impulse felt wrong, like it would’ve broken a spell.
But God, how I wish I had that footage today. That brief performance for an audience of four summed up everything Tom was about. He was a gentle giant, a wonderful musician, an actor’s actor, and a good man. He was magic.
Who Will Remember You?: “The Secret Agent” and the Humanities as Resistance (March 6, 2026)
It’s 1977, a “time of great mischief” in Brazil, and in the opening minutes of Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s “The Secret Agent,” Marcelo (Wagner Moura) appears to be on the run. He drives in the blazing heat, a raucous hint of Carnaval at the fringes—and the imminent threat of violence. A dead body outside of a gas station has been cooking in the sun for days, anonymized by a shot to the face, a sheet of cardboard covering it, and the police’s total disinterest in its existence. Marcelo, on the other hand, draws their interest almost immediately, and we can sense that he isn’t keen on the attention. Is he a dissident? A criminal? A spy? A communist? Truthfully, the federal police don’t really care, as long as he submits a donation to the “police Carnival fund.” He’s just another person to intimidate.
Our protagonist’s interest never abandons the gas station corpse, though. Even as the station attendant assures it has nothing to do with him, something about Marcelo’s gaze tells us it does. The corrupt cops are one thing, but this blatant, cruel disposability of life is a signal that in this moment in Brazil’s history, the ultimate punishment isn’t just your death, but the eradication of your existence.
Subsequent events in “The Secret Agent” throttle us into the throwback paranoid political thriller its title suggests. The familiar but colorful genre conventions are abundant: A corrupt civil police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) and his skull-cracking sons; bodies disposed of in the river under the cover of night; payphones and bugged telephone lines; forged passports; hitmen; sensational newspaper headlines; and split diopter shots as characters anxiously look over their shoulder.
And then, around the halfway point, something shifts, because these trademarks of intrigue are not the story of “The Secret Agent.” Marcelo—whose real name is Armando—is not the story, either. Not exactly. Midway through, we are abruptly introduced to a present-day university archivist, Flavia (Laura Lufési), who is trying to understand the past from what little memory remains. Slowly, “The Secret Agent” becomes Flavia’s story.
Mendonça‘s filmmaking career is a lifelong interrogation of memory, an interest that is most explicit in “The Secret Agent’s” dramaturgical predecessor, “Pictures of Ghosts.” The essay film documents the history of Recife (the capital of Pernambuco, Brazil) and its movie palaces as an elegy to the infrastructure of memory. For Mendonça, this is personal; the home featured in so many of his films is a document of his mother, an abolitionist historian who literally altered the apartment’s shape over decades. Mendonça’s neighbors appear as extras in his films, and the streets of Recife often make up his settings. Recife is where “The Secret Agent” takes place, and the movie is rife with the city’s history and culture (the soundtrack, for example, includes several tracks from Recife musician Lula Côrtes’ 1975 album “Paêbirú”).
“The Secret Agent” is also mired in the dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985, seldom directly acknowledged, but constant in the depiction of the era’s emboldened state-sanctioned violence. This movie is Mendonça’s attempt to prevent his country—and the world—from forgetting this period of history. But the movie is much more than an exercise in recall. “The Secret Agent,” more pointedly, is a movie about authoritarianism’s methodic persecution of the humanities as a field that documents, preserves, and deciphers collective memory.
Holding Objects of Memory
Nearly every facet of the humanities touches Armando: He is a researcher at a public university, the widower of a teacher, the son-in-law of a projectionist, a recipient of public funds, a subject of yellow (practically bile-colored) journalism, and briefly, a municipal record room employee. History won’t remember him as a freedom fighter against the Brazilian military dictatorship—so why is he being hunted like one?
The incident that leads to Armando’s persecution is an altercation years prior with Henrique Ghirotti, an energy executive who stands to benefit from the regime as the state pursues its business and development agendas. Ghirotti’s violence starts as bureaucratic. He drains university funding and lures researchers to private corporations until there are no remnants of Armando and his colleagues’ work. But what is implied to cost Armando’s wife, Fatima (Alice Carvalho), her life (and will eventually cost Armando his) is that they are witnesses to this abuse of power, and they will not submit to Ghirotti’s narrative. If it weren’t for the archived recordings of one wealthy resister (Elza, portrayed by Maria Fernanda Cândido), Armando’s honest memory wouldn’t exist at all.
Those tapes are just an example of the tangible objects of memory that texture the movie. At every turn, characters are interacting with photographs, records, newspapers, and written notes. Memory exists in the DNA of these objects. A photo is imprinted with the light that reflected from Fatima while she was alive. A vinyl record possesses within its grooves every little sound that makes up the rich melancholy of “Retiro: Tema de Amor Número 3” (something you can hold onto, unlike the crackling radio waves projecting Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now”). The films projected by Sr. Alexandre (Carlos Francisco) at the Cinema São Luiz possess a millisecond of life in a single frame (and, if you’re one of the hysterical audience members watching “The Omen,” you may even think they possess the Devil).
These are also the objects that can be manipulated and destroyed, an erasure as tangible as the item that held the memory. One of the most sensational sequences in “The Secret Agent” is based on a real-life Recife urban legend—”the Hairy Leg.” But while “the Hairy Leg” may have been obvious code for police misconduct, in the film, the sensationalism is all that is needed to turn violence against queer communities into an entertaining vision of a phantom leg terrorizing cruisers. “The Hairy Leg” becomes the story that lives on, whether true or not.
As we jump ahead in time, we come to understand that Flavia and her peer, Daniela, are the generation left to reckon with the implications of the dictatorship’s attacks on the humanities. The powers that be took control of Armando’s narrative. Prior to the recovery of Elza’s tapes, the sole remnant of Armando’s preserved existence was a newspaper clipping painting him as a corrupt researcher who hemorrhaged public funds. Beside the story is a graphic photo of his slain body. The memory of Armando the state preserved was a false one.
It is only through the processes of archiving and preservation—possible in this case through wealth—that allows a sliver of Armando’s honest existence to end up in Flavia’s possession. Elza’s donated archive of tapes documents the violent mischief of those days in Recife. Flavia and Daniela may have the thankless job of transcribing these tapes, but they also become the carriers of history. Naturally, then, Brazil’s politics of memory must intervene. The tapes are deemed “too sensitive,” abruptly withdrawn, and the transcription project is shut down. Decades later, the humanities remain a threat to power.
History Can’t Die With Us
Memory will always survive in some capacity through oral tradition. Sebastiana (Tânia Maria) may as well be a lockbox full of undocumented memory. Her tenants are all under persecution in one way or another and thus anonymized for protection. Their names cannot live on safely. Though the situations of some characters are evident—Thereza Vitória and Antonio (Isabél Zuaa and Licínio Januário) are Angolan Civil War refugees, for example—it is mostly unclear what brought these characters to the same place at the same point in time. The sole torchbearer of their existence is Sebastiana, just as she carries silent testimony from witnessing the war in Italy. But without some kind of preservation, these memories will eventually become warped, fuzzy, and faded.
Very early in “The Secret Agent,” Armando has a chance to spend time alone with his young Fernando. They talk about Fatima and what it means for someone to die. Though it is just the two of them in the car, Armando reminds his child that she is there with them because they carry her memory. Heartbreakingly, this does not stop his son from admitting days later that he is beginning to forget her.
As Flavia learns, the adult Fernando (Moura) has forgotten his father, too. Whatever tools Ghirotti and his conspirators used to erase Armando’s existence were successful as far as his son is concerned. He can’t fill in the gaps between the tapes and the papers. He shares with Flavia the closest thing he has to a memory of his father: Alexandre had once described how Fernando waited for his Armando to return the day he was killed. This isn’t really a part of Fernando’s recollection, but he says that by having someone else describe what happened, “you create a memory.”
Armando’s search for a record of his mother, who was physically and financially exploited by his father and grandparents, is an attempt to forge a memory of her that was withheld from him. Whether it is because of her implied indigeneity or a general attitude toward women as disposable, a record is unlikely to exist, yet Armando still searches for a single object bearing her name.
Perhaps Flavia’s attachment to Armando is through the memories she created from the few archives of his life—memories that had been withheld from Fernando until Flavia hands over a USB of the pirated archived recordings. These memories, like these, are incomplete, shaded by the perspective of whoever recounts them. Regardless, Flavia is defying the story Brazil would wish to tell about Armando. It is a small gesture that ensures Armando’s memory survives.
Preservation Pre- and Post-Google
“The Secret Agent’s” infrequent (but critical) jumps to the present day might feel alienating against its pulpy beats, but those genre-inflected scenes are representative of how one might try to make sense of an incomplete understanding of history with the limited artifacts that remain—cinematic flourishes by way of 1970s neo-noirs and Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws.” Armando and Flavia’s arcs are ultimately one and the same. Even if the threats they face feel considerably different in scale, these threats are outgrowths of the same authoritarian core.
In times of social and political strife, we often proclaim, “History will not look upon this moment kindly.” But how will history remember us if the historians are executed? Will Google remember you and me? (Daniela admits that she eventually stopped looking into Armando’s story because it is “pre-Google.”) Who will control our memories? Will we control them ourselves, or will they be in the hands of whoever has the privilege of rewriting them?
“The Secret Agent” is Mendonça’s effort to prevent Brazil and the world from erasing people like Armando, who were tortured and killed for any perceived opposition to the dictatorship. But the movie is also a metatextual exploration of the relationship to memory that is central to his career. Cinema, as a narrative and visual art form, is inevitably a factor in memory. Even (and perhaps especially) when it is dishonest, incomplete, or speculative, it shapes the truth.
The arts and humanities are an essential vanguard of resistance because they threaten the total and complete control authoritarianism demands, and that is why they become targets of attack through funding, censorship, and eradication. As the question of art’s involvement in politics (and vice versa) continues to plague filmmakers, Mendonça is unflinching in his belief that the two can’t be separated.
In the world of the movie and throughout all of Mendonça’s filmography, remembrance is an act of resistance as much as it is an act of love. To remember the lives lost to your home’s dark history is to love your home enough to want better for the future—to ensure that those who were lost are part of the prevailing collective memory of what makes up your home’s identity. Preservation differs from nostalgia. To remember is not to yearn for an idealism of the past. It is to walk with reverence amongst the ghosts that inhabit the present.
