Remake of: "Cape Fear" (J. Lee Thompson, 1962)

Thompson's original is a perfectly gripping, screws-tight family-in-peril thriller, but Scorsese and screenwriter Wesley Strick really took it to the next level by upending the moral framework of the family in question. With the central family man made into a figure only more silkily corrupt than the villainous Max Cady – with Juliette Lewis’s putatively virginal daughter figure a sexualized lynchpins between the two – it’s easily the more psychologically rich and thorny of the two films, placing the nuclear American family not just under threat, but on trial.