A film that makes you want to read the Japanese novel on which the film is based

Rating: 8/10 (16 February 2017)

The more I reflect on it, the film is important for its subject (read "the original Japanese novel"), but as cinema it is a recreation of sequences from other important films. This is Scorsese taking a leaf out of Tarantino, who was also a great cineaste.
One aspect of the film that I was impressed with was the development character of the Japanese man who constantly betrays his family, priests and friends and yet seeks forgiveness from God.
It is not great cinema--but it is a great subject, which could have been developed better. For instance, the Judas-equivalent in the film, betraying time and again and asking forgiveness each time--is a deep subject, which Scorsese merely treats as an appendage.
After the movie ends, we are not any wiser of how much was history and how much was fiction. I salute the author Shusako Endo, just as with The Last Temptation of Christ, I salute Nikos Kazantzakis, rather than Scorsese.
We cannot compare this film with Bergman's trilogy of Through the Glass Darkly, The Silence and Winter Light, because Bergman wrote the original scripts and never adapted books. Here, Jay Cocks and Scorsese were adapting Endo's novel.
The more disturbing fact is that Endo is not a historian but a novelist. One wonders what Cocks and Scorsese added to Endo's tale.