Scorsese has hit the rare heights of Ingmar Bergman and Carl Theodor Dreyer, artists who found in religion a battleground that often left the strongest in tatters, compromised and ruined. It’s a movie desperately needed at a moment when bluster must yield to self-reflection.

It’s a film full of tight close-ups of hands accepting gifts that comfort, inspire and bring succour to their recipients’ souls. That’s how we should receive it.

Silence is a slowly unfolding, deeply thoughtful film about questioning yourself. About questioning authority. About taking stock of where you've failed as a human being, and wondering how you can make amends — to yourself, to others, and to God.

Silence, more successfully than not, artfully addresses the core issue of its maker's lifelong religious struggle.

With ambition and reach, and often a real dramatic grandeur, Scorsese’s film has addressed the imperial crisis of Christian evangelists with stamina, seriousness and a gusto comparable to David Lean’s.