Eight minutes of radical darkness and innocence, rendered concrete in black and white. Sade’s characters committed quantitatively more evil acts, but nothing in his works is nearly as ecstatically sadistic as Mickey pulling on the tails of little piglets to mutate their pained squeals into music. Combining the mouse’s perverse freedom with animation’s inherent ability to maintain an absolute level of aesthetic control, Disney seems to have rediscovered the secret meeting point between libertarianism and fascism that exposes itself again…

For a movie that seemingly spends most of its runtime building to a singular theme—what meaning can exist in the face of death—it's still remarkable to me how readily Scorsese avoids abstraction. I Heard You Paint Houses (what else can you call the film except the name it gives itself?) functions primarily in a romantic mode, bursts of feeling melting into one another, a logic of passion rather than reason—all of it bent toward expressing the concrete, an arc categorizing…