The Age of Innocence

Director: Martin Scorsese

1993 / 139min / 35mm

One breathtaking composition follows another in Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece about social mores (and taboos) amongst New York’s viperous moneyed classes in late 19th-century New York, brought to life by an all-star lineup of craftspeople including cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, production designer Dante Ferretti, and composer Elmer Bernstein. In front of the camera there are Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer suffering beautifully as wealthy lawyer Newland Archer and Countess Ellen Olenska, the divorced pariah whom he yearns for, and Winona Ryder as Archer’s fiancée and, eventually, wife—outwardly a winsome innocent, but a cunning, cutthroat strategist where affairs of the heart are concerned. It was, Ryder stated during a recent appearance on (of all things) Hot Ones, “The role of a lifetime.”

Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment

Part of Winona Ryder Analogue Youth