Ethan Hawke plays a minister drinking himself to death in First Reformed.
“We tell our two or three stories—each time in a new disguise—maybe 10 times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that in 1933, it’s unlikely he’d have imagined how well it might one day describe the work of filmmaker Paul Schrader. Schrader’s career as a director includes a wide variety of stories and styles—from the brutal austerity of Blue Collar to the austere brutality of Affliction, from the elegant decadence of Mishima to the decadent elegance of The Comfort of Strangers, plus plenty of genre exercises (Cat People, Light of Day, Dominion: Prequel to The Exorcist) in between.
