Watch: Study Cinema History With Full Doc 'A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies'

Martin Scorsese, arguably one of the greatest living filmmakers, often gets unfairly branded as a guy who mainly makes “mafia” movies. While it’s true that Scorsese’s contributions to the genre (“Mean Streets,” “Goodfellas,” “The Departed”) are nothing to scoff at, it’s also an unfair and reductive generalization. The truth is that he has contributed to more cinematic genres then you can shake a bloody baseball bat at: from lavish period dramas to rock n’ roll documentaries, religious parables and children’s fantasies. Scorsese also peppers all his pictures with references to films that influenced him: for instance, his underrated “Shutter Island” is deeply indebted to Samuel Fuller’s “Shock Corridor." Of all the New Hollywood filmmakers that emerged in the 1970’s —those film-literate autodidacts who studied the visual language of forebearers Howard Hawks and John Ford and then radically rebelled against that selfsame establishment— Scorsese is almost certainly the most...