wealth and social climbing

His films like Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street obsessively examine how ambition and materialism corrupt characters climbing the social and criminal hierarchies.

Parasite and Memories of Murder use class conflict and social stratification as central metaphors for examining wealth inequality and the desperation to escape poverty.

A Marxist filmmaker whose works like The Leopard and Death in Venice dissect aristocratic decay and bourgeois ambition with operatic visual grandeur and moral critique.