Best Director: Martin Scorsese

The Irishman

How did the creator of Mean Streets, Goodfellas and Casino make yet another mob movie without repeating himself? By focusing, this time, on time itself. Though its occasional scenes of action and mayhem are a match for anything in his oeuvre, it’s fundamentally a ruminative movie, representing a director at the peak of his powers changing his game, not reveling in the incendiary moment so much as presenting a man looking back on life with a moral vision. Scorsese’s youthful masterpieces — Mean Streets and Taxi Driver — still influence our best films, yet he goes beyond them, still spiritually and artistically questing at 77.