Director: Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese has directed more than twenty-five features and an increasing number of documentaries, and the through line is guilt. The Catholic upbringing in Little Italy shows up in almost every picture as a character who knows exactly what he is doing wrong and does it anyway, then waits for a punishment that arrives late or not at all. Mean Streets states it plainly in the opening narration and the later films mostly stop announcing it.

The camera is restless in a way that became widely imitated and rarely equaled. The long Steadicam entrance into the Copacabana in Goodfellas is the famous example, but the more instructive one is the freeze frames and the narration cutting across each other, so the audience is told what happened before it watches it happen. That structure removes suspense on purpose and replaces it with dread, which is a harder effect and a more durable one.

His editor Thelma Schoonmaker has cut nearly everything since Raging Bull, and the collaboration is one of the most consequential in American film. The boxing sequences in that picture run at wildly varying speeds and camera heights, and none of it reads as showing off because the cutting keeps it anchored to what Jake LaMotta is feeling instead of what a spectator would see.

He won Best Director for The Departed after five previous nominations, has spent decades on film preservation through The Film Foundation, and remains an unusually public advocate for the theatrical form. For a writer the lesson is in his voiceovers: a narrator who tells you the ending in the first minute forces the story to be about how and why instead of what, which is almost always the more interesting question.