Where You’ve Seen Them Before: Martin Scorsese’s “Silence”

Martin Scorsese worked for thirty years to bring Shusaku Endo’s book Silence to the screen. It is finally in wide release this week, with an outstanding cast including:

Andrew Garfield is best known as “Spider-Man,” but he also co-starred in “Social Network” as Eduardo Saverin and most recently starred in “99 Homes” and “Hacksaw Ridge.”

Adam Driver, who lost 30 pounds for this part, appeared recently in both a prestige art-house film (a poet in Jim Jarmusch’s “Paterson”) and the biggest of the big-budget studio films (Kylo Ren in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens”). A former Marine and a Juilliard graduate, he had a starring role in Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and sang with Justin Timberlake and his “Force Awakens” co-star Oscar Isaac in the Coen Brothers’ “Inside Llewyn Davis.”

Tadanobu Asano may be familiar to American audiences from the “Thor” films or “47 Ronin.”

Liam Neeson is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, an Oscar winner for “Schindler’s List,” and an action star in the “Taken” films. This week he stars in both major nationwide releases, with a motion capture/voice performance in “A Monster Calls.” You can see him in “Love Actually,” “Leap of Faith,” “The Dark Knight Rises,” “Kinsey,” and “Rob Roy,” and you can hear him as the voice of Aslan in the “Narnia” films.