And because both he and Scorsese worship at the altar of cinema, each chapter of The Saints is filled with allusions to the movies they love. The Joan of Arc episode, for example, pays homage to Robert Bresson and Carl Theodor Dryer, while the Kolbe episode has some of the verite immediacy of such neorealist masters as Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica. But Leshem is also adamant that being a believer in a particular faith—Catholicism in Scorsese’s case or Judaism in his—isn’t a pre-requisite to watch The Saints. In fact,…
