Scorsese at his most leisurely, meandering and engrossing: The Irishman reviewed

The Irishman is Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic — a mobster-a-thon, you could say — starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and a light sprinkling of Harvey Keitel (he’s only in a couple of scenes). It’s based on the true, late-life confession of Mafia hitman Frank ‘The Irishman’ Sheeran and, while gangster flicks can often leave me cold and sometimes baffled — he was dispatched to sleep with the fishes for why? — this is magnificently engrossing. I wasn’t bored for a single minute which, given there are 210 of them, has to be a triumph, surely.

Financed by Netflix to the tune of $160 million, this is hitting cinemas briefly — it wouldn’t be eligible for the Oscars otherwise — before arriving at the channel on 27 November. More bladder-friendly, watching at home, but I beseech you to see it on a big screen and, in preparation, you could always dehydrate from breakfast, as I did. (It’s the only way.) It is cinematic from the word go, opening with a single, sinuous tracking shot leading us down the corridor of a Catholic old folks’ home — with its religious paraphernalia everywhere, you are already thinking about sin and redemption — until the camera settles on Frank (De Niro), now in his eighties.

He starts telling his story, one that will take us back half a century, detailing how he became involved with the mob and how he became the right-hand man of Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino), the union leader who was in bed with organised crime and ‘disappeared’ in 1975. (The screenplay by Steven Zaillian is based on I Heard You Paint Houses, the Charles Brandt book in which Sheeran confessed to more than 25 murders.) Elsewhere, Pesci plays Russell Bufalino, a mob boss, while Keitel plays Angelo Bruno, the boss of bosses, and Anna Paquin stars as Peggy, Frank’s estranged daughter.