By the end of the 1990s, Martin Scorsese was recognized as one of the most significant of American film directors. His uncompromising cinematic examination of New York City's underbelly, beginning with Mean Streets (1973), has exerted a profound cultural influence on cinemagoers and filmmakers. Scorsese was initially one of a select group of innovative young filmmakers, famously dubbed the Movie Brats, who began making a mark during the 1960s and went on to secure major reputations. By the 1990s, Francis Ford Coppola, who had led the way for the Movie Brats, had become a venerable but unpredictable artist, veering dizzily between huge successes and dismal failures; George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, was long entrenched in trailblazing technology; Brian De Palma was committed to a controversial, individualistic and uneven course as a skillful specialist in screen violence; and Steven Spielberg reigned as the acknowledged...