With Netflix's 'The Irishman,' Martin Scorsese is still cinema's greatest risk taker

In a recent New York Times editorial that he surely wishes he hadn't had to write (though I'm deeply grateful that he did), Martin Scorsese put his finger on what he considers Hollywood's most dispiriting change over the last 20 years: "the gradual but steady elimination of risk."

Not even Scorsese's toughest critics - and they have been particularly vocal of late, for reasons we'll get to shortly - would deny that he knows of what he speaks. However you define risk in contemporary Hollywood moviemaking - moral ambiguity, unsympathetic characters, a story not adapted from material with a built-in fan base - his work positively teems with it and always has. Like many filmmakers who flourished in the '70s, often hailed as American cinema's nerviest decade, Scorsese, in movies like "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver," seemed intent on pushing a commercial medium to ever darker, edgier extremes.

Scorsese has evolved in the years since, but he hasn't mellowed. His staggeringly rich output from this decade alone is predicated on a bold mix of conceptual daring and visual extravagance. There are many ways to characterize a body of work that includes an elaborate 3D children's fantasy about the importance of film preservation ("Hugo"), an old-dark-house thriller set in the labyrinth of the subconscious ("Shutter Island") and a nearly three-hour boardroom bacchanal ("The Wolf of Wall Street"), but "safe" and "unimaginative" are not among them.

For Scorsese, a filmmaker with nothing left to prove, the risk has become its own reward. In an industry that seeks out sure bets and safe material, he continues to swing for the proverbial