Silence: Martin Scorsese's Meditation on the Nature of Faith

God bless Martin Scorsese... although Christians probably still have a bone to pick with him. Nearly three decades after his ambitious, misunderstood The Last Temptation of Christ, Marty’s back interpreting another difficult work, Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence, using its story to pick at the stitches of his New York Catholic upbringing. Silence, which is perhaps Scorsese’s most overtly religious movie, is self-recommending: It’s a nearly three-hour film about Portuguese missionaries in post-feudal Japan, and a slow meditation on the nature of one’s faith in one Jesus Christ. Based on that description, you’re either all in or all out.