6. Kundun- Martin Scorsese
Previously known for: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy and Goodfellas Like Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese's movies tend to lean their focus more towards darker themes and portrayals of humanity. Whether it be the conflicted Catholicism present in Mean Streets, the calmly hidden psychosis in Taxi Driver or the anger inflicted tirades of Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Kundun has a sense of hope that runs throughout the narrative in a way that is unusual for a Scorsese picture. He has dealt with religion and its consequences before in his superb The Last Temptation of Christ, but that film had a stylistic resemblance to his other movies that is absent in Kundun. Roger Deakins' cinematography uses very bright lighting to convey the struggles of the Dalai Lama in the movie, while Scorsese's direction tends to focus more on the challenges presented to the Dalai Lama more often than the man himself. This gives the film a feeling unlike any that Scorsese has directed before because the characters aren't at the forefront of the movie when they are almost always the centerpieces of his narratives.