The Scorsese Trilogy Nobody Talks About Anymore

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Bringing out the Dead, 1999.

[00:00:02]Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader screenplay.

[00:00:06]Nicolas Cage is a burned-out New York paramedic working night shifts in Hell's Kitchen in the early 90s, haunted by the ghost of a girl he couldn't save.

[00:00:15]This is the film that completes Scorsese's New York trilogy alongside Taxi Driver and After Hours, and almost nobody places it in that company because almost nobody saw it.

[00:00:24]Cage plays Frank Pierce with a hollowed-out exhaustion that is one of his most controlled and most devastating performances.

[00:00:31]The night shifts blur together. The city looks like it's already on fire.

[00:00:36]Tom Sizemore, Ving Rhames, and John Goodman play as rotating partners, and each of them represents a different way of surviving a job that takes something from you every single night. Scorsese shoots New York with the same kinetic, almost hallucinatory energy as Taxi Driver, but where Travis Bickle was building toward explosion, Frank Pierce is just trying to stay together long enough to feel something again.