Bringing Out the Dead

This tense urban drama stars Nicolas Cage as Frank Pierce, a paramedic on the brink of physical and emotional collapse. Frank has worked for years in one of New York's most brutal neighborhoods, and the pressure of his job has taken its toll; plagued with self-doubt, he is haunted by the spirits of ...more

Set in the recently departed past of pre-Rudy Giuliani New York, Bringing Out the Dead (1999) reunites Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader for another, different night crawl through a yet to be sanitized Hell's Kitchen. The manholes still belch Stygian steam and the protagonist still exists on the edge of sanity, but this time Nicolas Cage's ambulance driver makes a rocky ascent toward a tentative salvation rather than repeating Taxi Driver's (1976) descent into an ultra-violent inferno. ...more