Bringing Out the Dead

Director: Martin Scorsese

1999 / 121min / 35mm

Scorsese’s last film set in contemporary New York City—and his last collaboration with Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader—is a Dantean journey across nocturnal Manhattan starring Nicolas Cage as a night-shift paramedic and self-described “grief mop” who, in the course of one long dusk-to-dawn voyage, travels through a litany of ghoulish and gristly encounters in a fumbling quest for redemption. By turns madcap and morose, Bringing Out the Dead is part city symphony, part Breughel hellscape, a vivid portrait of NYC at the end of the century and a man at the end of his wits.