For many filmmakers, their twilight years are a period of slowdown and downsizing with smaller, less ambitious works replacing the grand epics and massive swings that defined their careers. That makes Martin Scorseses recent film run (starting with The Wolf of Wall Street in 2013 and continuing with Silence in 2016 and The Irishman in 2019) all the more remarkable. As he approaches his eighth decade, his films have only grown in ambition, subverting the genre convention he had helped popularize with his most famous works to tell a grand, interwoven tale about the history of America and how it is entrenched with exploitation and violence.