Wiseguys, Killers, and Saints: Ranking the Films of Martin Scorsese from ‘Mean Streets’ to ‘GoodFellas’ to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

---

When Martin Scorsese’s debut film, Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, played at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1967, then-novice film critic Roger Ebert predicted it would herald the arrival of a major filmmaking talent. He was right. In the five decades since, Scorsese has firmly cemented himself not just as a great director, but as perhaps THE greatest living director today. And at 80-years-old, he shows no signs of relinquishing that title anytime soon.

Born in 1942 in New York’s Little Italy neighborhood, Scorsese grew up surrounded by gangsters and priests, and his films often reflect a world of guilt and sin, punishment and salvation. Sick with asthma, Scorsese kept indoors and learned about life through the movies. His work is a hodgepodge of influences, from the Technicolor theatricality of Powell and Pressburger to the gritty street scenes of Italian neorealism. It can be said that Scorsese is incapable of making an impersonal film, even the ones he’s made for-hire, and his body of work is an embodiment of his deepest desires, fears, and yearnings, often played out in the plight of his morally conflicted protagonists.

His filmography reads like an honor roll of great titles: Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, After Hours, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, The Age of Innocence, Casino, The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman. Remarkably, only one of his films, The Departed, won him the Oscar for Best Director (he’s been nominated thirteen additional times across the directing, writing, and producing categories). Yet the Academy Awards are merely one barometer of quality, and Scorsese’s work has most certainly won the long game.

Scorsese’s love of film has extended to his work as a preservationist, and he has worked tirelessly to restore thousands of films that would otherwise be lost to time through his formation of The Film Foundation and The World Cinema Project. He has also helped shepherd the careers of several up-and-coming filmmakers, producing for the likes of Spike Lee, Joanna Hogg, and the Safdie Brothers. He’s even found time to direct several documentaries, including the seminal concert film The Last Waltz, the music doc No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, and the cinema history deep dive A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

He’s back in theaters with Killers of the Flower Moon (Cannes review here, release review here), a sprawling, epic story of crime and bloodshed in 1920s Oklahoma. Let’s celebrate by taking a look back at every Martin Scorsese movie, ranked worst to best. (Since trying to rank a filmography filled with as many treasures as Scorsese’s is a herculean task, I’ve enlisted my friends Sophia Ciminello and Ryan McQuade to lend a hand. This ranking represents our collective opinions on Scorsese’s oeuvre, which, in a testament to the sheer quality of so many of his films, was all over the place.) – Zach Laws

26. Boxcar Bertha (1972)

Legend has it that when John Cassavetes, the indie maverick who championed Scorsese’s micro budget debut Who’s That Knocking at My Door?, saw his followup, Boxcar Bertha, he said, “Marty, you’ve just spent a whole year of your life making a piece of shit.” Although he thought the Roger Corman produced exploitation flick was a good movie, Cassavetes recognized there was little of Scorsese’s personality in it. He encouraged him to not get sucked into the Hollywood machine, instead focusing on telling a story that was meaningful to him. Thankfully, Scorsese next made Mean Streets and never looked back. Made to cash in on the success of Bonnie and Clyde, the film stars Barbara Hershey as Bertha, a Depression-era woman who takes to riding the railroads after her father is murdered. She falls in love with union organizer Big Bill Shelly (David Carradine), and the two set off on a rail-hopping crime spree.  – Zach Laws

25. Kundun (1997)

Scorsese contemplated becoming a priest before pursuing filmmaking, and his work is obviously influenced by the strict teachings of his pre-Vatican II Catholic upbringing. This relationship with spirituality has led Scorsese to direct two films centered on the lives of religious figures: The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. Yet while Last Temptation managed to examine Jesus as equal parts God and man, Kundun can only see the Dalai Lama as a figurehead, never quite grasping his inner life. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty to appreciate about the film. When we first meet the 14th incarnation of the Buddah in 1937, he’s a young boy imparted with great responsibility. By 1959, he’s been driven out of Tibet by Chinese Communist forces who believed there was no place for religion in the modern world. Roger Deakins’ painterly cinematography and Philip Glass’ evocative score help to create a sense of stepping into a cathedral to worship. It can only be described as a cinematic prayer, a meditation on the nature of faith and a dying way of life. – ZL

24. Who’s That Knocking at My Door? (1967)

Scorsese’s first feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door, shows the young filmmaker’s rebellious energy and penchant for telling stories about Italian-American men. Shot on a shoestring budget and cobbled together after title changes and rewrites, Scorsese’s messy and meandering film announced “the arrival of an important new director,” according to Roger Ebert. The story follows JR (Harvey Keitel) and his friends running around, getting into mischief, and chasing girls in their Little Italy neighborhood. It’s a simple story, so additional subplots were spliced in throughout its production, most notably a relationship between JR and a nameless blonde played by Zina Bethune. Despite the chaotic production, traces of Scorsese’s signature themes, such as Catholic guilt and repression, the Madonna-whore complex, and Italian-American life in New York City, can be found throughout. King of the low-budget exploitation film, Roger Corman loved Who’s That Knocking At My Door and convinced John Cassavetes to check it out. When he did, he compared Scorsese’s debut to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. It’s a bit hyperbolic, but it inspired something in the master of independent cinema and led to a life-changing mentorship and friendship. If only Cassavetes could watch the films of Scorsese now. – Sophia Ciminello

23. Bringing Out the Dead (1999)

In what was the last collaboration between Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, Bringing Out the Dead substitutes a taxi cab for an ambulance as follows paramedic Frank Pierce (Nicholas Cage) slowing burning out from his night shift job, suffering from increased anxiety from all the patients that have died during his dreaded night shift. Known for being one of Cage’s most underrated performances (and one he told us back in 2022 that he hoped people would talk about more from his filmography), Bringing Out the Dead is a throwback to the complicated, tragic heroes that both Scorsese and Schrader presented in their earlier work together like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, providing no sense of relief to Frank’s ongoing nightmare. Its overall social commentary and narrative focus are not as sharp as their previous work together, but that hasn’t stopped this film from becoming the subject of reevaluation over the last couple of years, becoming the Scorsese title that has yet to fully receive the credit some think it deserves. – Ryan McQuade

22. Shutter Island (2010)

How does Martin Scorsese follow-up finally winning Best Director and his Best Picture winning modern crime blockbuster; by making a neo-noir psychological, horror thriller with an all-classical music soundtrack that’s how. With Shutter Island, we follow Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as they portray two “duly appointed Federal Marshals” assigned to investigate a psychiatric facility after the strange disappearance of one of its patients. As the two lawmen start to peel back the layers of this unusual case, the more dive into the tragic past of DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels, and true to Dennis Lehane’s novel of the same name, it all comes together to shocking twists at the end of the film that many won’t see coming on first viewing. Moved to a February 2010 release date due to the studio not having enough funds to run a proper awards campaign the year before, the film was another box office hit for Scorsese, showcasing his unique balance of making an entertaining popcorn flick alongside his distinct artistic flare. It’s a shame that in the decade plus since, each viewing has been chasing that feeling of seeing it for the first time, swallowed by the weight of its twist ending and overstuffed runtime. – RM

21. Gangs of New York (2002)

Perhaps the most hotly contested title in Scorsese’s filmography, Gangs of New York bears the scars of a troubled production and lengthy editing process. Set on the mean streets of 19th century New York, it begins with a brutal battle for the Five Points, with “Priest” Vallon (Liam Neeson) leading the Irish Catholic immigrants against their native-born rivals, led by Bill the Butcher (Daniel Day-Lewis at his scenery-chewing best). Bill slays Priest in front of his young son, Amsterdam, sending him to an orphanage; as an adult, Amsterdam (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) returns to the Five Points to enact his revenge. Scorsese has long been fascinated by the ways in which violence and corruption are entwined in the American quilt, and he shows that here with the dirty dealings of Tammany Hall led by “Boss” Tweed (Jim Broadbent), who’s held under the Bill’s bloody thumb. There’s enough story here for five movies, including a love story between Amsterdam and Bill’s surrogate daughter, the pickpocket Jenny (Cameron Diaz). It nearly crumbles under the weight of its own ambitions, yet for all of its shortcomings, this would be the crown jewel for many directors whose names weren’t Martin Scorsese. – ZL

20. Cape Fear (1991)

Even Scorsese’s for-hire jobs are infused with his obsessions and predilections, and that’s certainly true of Cape Fear, which reimagines the 1962 thriller as an almost biblical tale of guilt and sin in the American South. Robert De Niro is terrifying as Max Cady, who served a 14 year prison sentence for raping a 16-year-old girl. Cady emerges from prison, muscular and covered in tattoos, determined to take revenge on the defense attorney, Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte), he believes withheld evidence in his trial. The great masterstroke of Scorsese’s reinterpretation is to turn Bowden from a straight-laced good guy into one of the director’s typically morally conflicted protagonists. The Bowden household had already been upended by Sam’s infidelity, and old wounds with his wife, Leigh (Jessica Lange), and daughter, Danielle (Juliette Lewis), are torn open when Cady arrives. Scorsese makes overt what could only be hinted at in the original version, creating something that feels truly dirty and unseemly. Robert Mitchum, Gregory Peck, and Martin Balsam, who starred in the 1962 version, show up for bit roles in this one. – ZL

19. Hugo (2011)

It’s difficult to imagine the director of The Wolf of Wall Street and Taxi Driver making a film for moviegoers of all ages, but Hugo sees Scorsese venturing outside of his cinematic wheelhouse to craft a dazzling tale about what it means to fall in love with movies. Based on Brian Selznick’s children’s book, “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,” the film follows Hugo (Asa Butterfield), an orphan who takes care of the clocks in the Montparnasse train station in Paris in 1931. Hugo is kept company by an Automaton, who he believes will provide a secret message from his late father once he is repaired. When Hugo and his new friend Isabelle (Chloe Grace Moretz) fix the Automaton, that secret message turns out to be an image from Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon, transporting the characters into a sparkling world of classic cinema. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Scorsese is the most essential film preservationist alive. With the creation of the Film Foundation in 1990, Scorsese has spent decades preserving cinema and amplifying creative voices around the globe. While it may not include the brutal violence of his earlier films or the cast of characters we’ve grown accustomed to, Hugo is Scorsese in his purest form, as a filmgoer filled with wonder, a master filmmaker, and a protector of art so that all generations can take part in the magic. – SC

18. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)

By the time The Last Temptation of Christ finally made its way to the screen, the controversy surrounding it nearly threatened to obscure the actual film. A long in the making passion project, Scorsese’s adaptation of Nikos Kazantzakis’ novel created a firestorm amongst Christian conservatives for portraying Jesus Christ (Willem Dafoe) as equal parts god and man. As portrayed by Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader, Jesus is filled with doubt and fear about his crucifixion, desperate not to die for the sins of mankind. His last temptation occurs on the cross, as he imagines the life he could lead with Mary Magdalene (Barbara Heshey) if he chose not to fulfill his divine destiny. Scorsese drew righteous ire for a sex scene between Jesus and Mary, and was threatened with violence from evangelicals who clearly ignored their savior’s plea to love thy neighbor. Yet for all of the objections over how closely Scorsese sticks to the gospels (the majority of which were made by people who didn’t even see the film), this remains the most profoundly affecting portrayal of the life of Christ precisely because it makes his struggle so human. To see Jesus wrestle with uncertainty is to understand the very nature of faith itself, which ultimately relies upon that which cannot be known for sure. – ZL

17. After Hours (1985)

Following the financial failure of The King of Comedy and the collapse of The Last Temptation of Christ at Paramount, Scorsese was faced with a simple decision: leave the movie business for good, or regain his footing with a smaller project? Thankfully, the script for After Hours found its way into his hands around that same time. You can feel the director’s pessimism coursing throughout this story of a Manhattan word processor (Griffin Dunne) whose night out with an eccentric girl (Rosanna Arquette) goes from bad to worse to downright nightmarish. Yet there’s a playfulness to the darkly comedic film, which presents New York’s SoHo neighborhood as something resembling a Hieronymus Bosch painting, with a large cast of eccentrics (including Teri Garr, Catherine O’Hara, and John Heard) out to kill our protagonist – much the same way Hollywood tried to kill Scorsese’s career. The film, which was originally set to be helmed by Tim Burton, did the trick of getting the director back on solid ground, and is one of the great mini-masterpieces of a stellar filmography. – ZL

16. The Color of Money (1986)

Scorsese has always been the ultimate servant of his art form. He’s a student of the medium, understanding its history better than anyone. So when he is handed the keys to make a sequel to The Hustler, one of the most influential films of the 1960s and a film that contains one of Paul Newman’s best performances. Returning to the role that made him a star, The Color of Money finds Newman’s Eddie Felson helps train a young, cocky Vincent (Tom Cruise) everything he knows about pool hustling, and in doing so, decides that after years of standing on the sideline, he’s ready to get back in the game. With each pool sequence expertly arranged together by the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker, alongside every needle drop selected by Scorsese (the use of Werewolves of London by Warren Zevon being a massive highlight), the film is a well-oiled machine of a sports movie that can stand proudly next to Robert Rossen’s classic. What makes it special is that it not only finally won Newman his Oscar for Best Actor, but it is also seen as a passing of the torch moment in cinema history from one of the greatest movie stars of all time in Newman to Cruise who was right on his way to becoming the superstar he is today. – RM

15. The Aviator (2004)

It is notorious that Hollywood had been trying to make a Howard Hughes biopic for the better part of twenty years. The project went through multiple studios, dozens of rewrites, and was presented to some of the biggest directors in the industry including Michael Mann, Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, William Friedkin, Miloš Forman, and even a young Christopher Nolan, all who didn’t get to make this project come to life in the late 1990s to the early 2000s. But with a script penned by John Logan, Scorsese was brought in to work alongside his Gangs of New York leading man Leonardo DiCaprio, and thus they set off to tackle this enormous challenge (with an outrageous $110-million-dollar budget) and make a film about one of the most fascinating political and cultural figures in American history. The end result was a monumental achievement that ranks as one of the great modern bio-pics, and was an excellent showcase for DiCaprio’s acting range, playing someone who rises to become one of the most influential men on the planet, only to be down by not just his enemies, but by his tragic condition of obsessive–compulsive disorder, expertly depicted throughout the film’s nearly three-hour runtime. Nominated for eleven Oscars and winner of five including Best Supporting Actress for Cate Blanchett’s stellar performance as screen legend Katharine Hepburn, The Aviator is epic filmmaking at its finest. – RM

14. New York, New York (1977)

Created in a style that resembles the vibrant works of Vincente Minnelli and Powell and Pressburger, New York, New York is Scorsese’s criminally underrated ode to the studio Hollywood Musical. At a lively USO celebration on VJ Day, a hotheaded young jazz musician, Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro), meets Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli), an aspiring nightclub singer, and a complex love affair begins. Like A Star is Born and later La La Land, both stars can’t shine with the same wattage forever, and Francine’s career begins to eclipse Jimmy’s. The brilliance of New York, New York isn’t just that we see Scorsese stepping out of his comfort zone and into a new genre. It’s how he approaches the artifice of Old Hollywood productions, incorporating visual callbacks to the past while illuminating the realism and raw truth of the present. Perhaps the film’s greatest contribution to popular culture is the creation of the “Theme from New York, New York,” penned by Kander and Ebb for the movie and driven to popularity when Frank Sinatra covered it in 1979. When Francine sings the now famous city anthem at the end of the film, it’s a testament to Minnelli’s star power and works as a beautiful ode to her mother, Judy Garland. When I first heard Minnelli sing this showstopping finale, I could only see and hear Garland, as if the two were inextricably linked with Francine’s expression of triumph and exhaustion. Start spreadin’ the news: New York, New York is one of Scorsese’s best films. –SC

13. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

In an age when representation can be misinterpreted as endorsement, The Wolf of Wall Street might be the most criminally misunderstood entry in Scorsese’s filmography. In adapting Jordan Belfort’s memoir about his years as a criminal stockbroker, Scorsese revels in the bacchanalian decadence of 1980s-90s Wall Street. Yet just like with GoodFellas, the director makes it explicitly clear that the short term pleasures of crime will catch up to you in the long run. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Belfort with the fervor and magnetism of a megachurch preacher, showing how this fraudulent wolf could recruit sheep to his fold. Rather than hit you over the head with explicit denunciations of his characters, Scorsese trusts the audience to bring their own moral compass to the film. Needless to say, if you come away from this admiring Belfort, you’ve seriously misread the message, and that’s part of the point: in an era when someone as obviously corrupt as Donald Trump can ascend to the presidency, it’s little wonder that Belfort can remain an icon even after the wool falls off. – ZL

12. The Departed (2006)

Known for incorporating dozens of popular songs like “Layla,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Be My Baby,” and, of course, “Gimme Shelter,” into his films, it’s only fitting that Scorsese made a movie that feels like his own personal greatest hits album. The Departed sees Scorsese trading in his Italian-American gangsters of New York for the Irish gangsters of South Boston, a city with just as many rats. Even though the film is a remake of Infernal Affairs and a director-for-hire job, it maintains Scorsese’s core preoccupations. How do we define ourselves? How does that definition fit into the idea of the person we feel compelled to become? Mob boss Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) knows there is an ongoing investigation into his crimes, so he plants Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon) as a spy within the Massachusetts State Police. Simultaneously, the police assign Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) to go undercover and infiltrate Costello’s gang. The fact that The Departed includes a murderer’s row of movie stars, scored at the box office, and won Scorsese his Oscar makes it tempting to relegate this to populist, dorm room fare. The fact that it can be that, while also incorporating signature Scorsese themes, makes it a fun rewatch. The Boston accents in this movie are worth the price of admission alone, ranging from fabulous (Damon) to “I’m done trying” (Nicholson). – SC

11. Mean Streets (1973)

Released between The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, Mean Streets represented the type of Mafia movie that could usher in the New Hollywood Era. It didn’t have the elegance or the weight of a Greek tragedy like Coppola’s films, but it did have a young director named Martin Scorsese, eager to bring his version of Italian-American gangsters to the silver screen. Set in the Little Italy neighborhood where Scorsese grew up, the film follows Charlie (Harvey Keitel), a man who alternates between spending his time in church contemplating his Catholic guilt and on the mean streets of New York trying to fix the mistakes of his dangerous best friend, Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro). It may be his third feature, but Mean Streets is the first film that brought Scorsese’s style and filmmaking trademarks to life, influencing American independent cinema for decades. The use of the color red, the voiceover, the tracking shot, and pop needle drops are all Scorsese signatures that come to life here, along with his lifelong partnership with his greatest muse, Robert De Niro. The gritty film is bursting with vitality as if he never wanted to stop making movies. Luckily, Mean Streets was just the beginning. – SC

10. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)

One of the great dramatic threads of Scorsese’s work has been examining the ways in which violence and corruption are central to the American Dream. With Killers of the Flower Moon, he explores how they are ingrained in our country’s DNA through its original sin: the genocide of Native Americans. Having been displaced from their land, members of the Osage tribe strike it rich with oil money in 1920s Oklahoma. Yet a group of white settlers seek to take that wealth away from them, first by marrying their women, then by systematically killing off tribe members. Robert De Niro is chilling as the charming William “King” Hale, a wealthy businessman who recruits his nephew, WWI veteran Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), to marry and murder Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) for her money. In adapting David Grann’s nonfiction bestseller, Scorsese shifts the focus away from the FBI’s investigation into the killings (led by Jesse Plemmons as Agent Tom White) and onto Mollie’s relationship with Ernest, which is rich with emotion and complexity. In this way, he shows the importance of bringing these forgotten stories to life, and scrutinizes the history of who gets to tell them. – ZL

9. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)

Sandwiched in-between Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, two of Scorsese’s most well known films of his entire filmography, lies a masterpiece so polar opposite of those two films, you would think someone else had directed it. With Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Scorsese developed a smaller project alongside actress Ellen Burstyn, who was not only the biggest in-demand actress at the time following the success of The Exorcist but was blown away by what Scorsese had done with Mean Streets and set up a meeting with him shortly after seeing the film. The film centers around a recently widowed woman and her son who move across the country in search of a new life, only to end up in Tucson, Arizona where Alice starts working at a local diner. In this stripped down drama, Scorsese is able to present a captivating portrait of a complex modern woman struggling with the decisions of her past, and the emotional toll it takes in figuring out what is the right move for her future and the life she wants for her child. And in doing that, he was able to capture one of Ellen Burstyn’s finest performances of her career, with her winning the 1975 Best Actress Oscar for her stunning performance. – RM

8. Casino (1995)

I’ll never forget the first time I saw Sharon Stone wearing that gray chinchilla fur coat. I was 12, home sick from school, and Casino was on TNT. Sharon Stone’s unhinged (and Academy Award-nominated) portrayal of Casino Queen Ginger McKenna pulled me into Scorsese’s epic morality tale, which proves to be more twisted and rewarding with each viewing. Ginger eventually finds herself caught in a love triangle with two mafia men tied up in the money that runs through the Tangiers Casino: Ace (Robert De Niro), an associate who oversees operations, and Nicky (Joe Pesci), a psychopathic enforcer and childhood friend of Ace, brought in to protect him and the casino. Casino is the photonegative of Goodfellas–a gangster picture where the lure of excess is even more potent and the fall from grace much more dramatic. It’s a story about middle-aged criminals working in middle management, so the allure and excitement of becoming a part of something bigger is absent from the start. It’s a dazzling, bruising cinematic odyssey worth visiting for Stone’s costumes and devastating, layered performance alone. She unfortunately lost out on winning the Best Actress Oscar, and whenever I remember that little bit of trivia, I wish I could tell The Academy, “You’ve got the wrong girl.” – SC  

7. Silence (2016)

For the longest time, Scorsese had fixated on the theme of religious guilt throughout many of his films, adding it as an additional layer to their already complex moral situations. But with Silence, his fixation becomes the main subject in a harrowing story about two Jesuit priests traveling to Japan to not only spread the work of God where it is forbidden but also to rescue their mentor who is rumored to have given up his Catholic faith. Led by two extraordinary lead performances from Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver, and supported by bone chilling, terrific work from Tadanobu Asano and Liam Neeson, Scorsese’s decades long passion project was finally made and displayed that the filmmaker was willing to go to places he had not gone before with his religious films with a willingness to question and contradict the lessons he’s been taught throughout his whole life to demonstrate the moral and human dangers that blind faith can have on one’s soul, as well as the misunderstanding of one’s culture from the other side of the world. Silence is a vital piece of filmmaking that is necessary to the director’s overall body of work, captured beautifully through Rodrigo Prieto’s gorgeous Oscar nominated cinematography. – RM

6. The King of Comedy (1983)

Riding off the success of Raging Bull, Scorsese was strongly considering retiring from feature filmmaking, with the only intention of working on something in the future, like The Last Temptation of Christ, and only with Robert De Niro. Well when De Niro declined to play Jesus, he got Scorsese to jump on the idea of directing a comedy, something the pair had never done before. Thus The King of Comedy was born, a film that follows De Niro in a dangerously committed performance as Rupert Pupkin, an up-and-coming comic who becomes obsessed with the idea of becoming a star, so much so that he kidnaps his comedy idol (a fantastic Jerry Lewis) in an attempt to become famous and have his fifteen minutes of fame. Due to the darkly comedic subject matter and the audience’s expectations changing in the early 1980s, the film was considered to be critically divisive and a box office flop (something that Scorsese will still talk about to this day in interviews and even TikTok videos with his daughter). But forty years later, those initial reactions have been proven wrong, as The King of Comedy’s commentary on celebrity culture, dangerous fan bases, and the obsession with becoming famous has remained both razor sharp and shockingly accurate. – RM

5. Raging Bull (1980)

Scorsese ended the 1970s in a hospital bed, nearly dead from cocaine use. When Robert De Niro came to visit him, he brought with him a copy of a memoir he had been trying to convince the director to make for some time: Raging Bull, the story of former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta. Having turned down the project several times because he had no interest in boxing, Scorsese emerged from his hospital room to direct what many consider to be the finest film of the 1980s, and the last gasp of the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s. What Scorsese latched onto wasn’t the idea of boxing as a sport, but boxing as a form of self-flagellation. LaMotta (De Niro) uses his time in the ring to exorcize his demons, to work out his self-loathing, his jealous insecurity over his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), his complicated relationship with his brother and manager, Joey (Joe Pesci). The punishment of his body extends to his later life, when his boxing career is over and he’s morphed into an overweight nightclub emcee (De Niro, who won an Oscar for the role, famously took time off to gain 70 pounds by eating his way through Europe). More than living up to its title, Raging Bull feels like a primal scream of rage, passion, and anguish, made by a man who fought his own battle with self-destruction and lived to tell the tale. – ZL 

4. The Irishman (2019)

Scorsese’s late-career masterpiece about the thorny relationship between Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci), his crime family hitman Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro), and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) sees the auteur entering a new chapter in his study of the American gangster. The intoxicating glamour of the Mafia present in his earlier films was just a ruse, a shiny veneer covering up the brutal emptiness of organized crime. The intimate epic also marks Scorsese’s first collaboration with a streaming service, Netflix. But don’t fall for the temptation to turn The Irishman into a miniseries—that cuts the full Thelma Schoonmaker masterclass off at the knees. In what may be the finest work of her career, she and Scorsese beautifully give us the sense that time expands and contracts while building to those brutal, devastating final 70 minutes. And after all that time we’ve spent with Frank as he recounts stories that he may have fabricated for all we know, there’s nothing left for him but more time until the inevitable. It makes me wish this was just the beginning for Scorsese, yet seeing him so confident and self-assured, without the bravado of his previous gangster films, makes me grateful to see a film with the flourishes of someone who has, like Frank, experienced all of that time. – SC

3. Taxi Driver (1976)

With his fifth feature, Martin Scorsese firmly established himself as an essential artist voice within his generation by creating one of cinema’s most talked about films of all time, Taxi Driver. Spearheaded by one of the boldest performances ever put on screen by Robert De Niro, we ride in the passenger seat of Travis Bickle’s life as a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran working the night shift as a cab driver in 1970s New York City. Sharply written by Paul Schrader, we witness Travis’s descent into madness and feel completely uncomfortable by every interaction he has with another human being, especially his relationships with Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy and Jodie Foster’s Iris. But what makes Taxi Driver such a unique special experience is Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro’s willingness to place Travis in morally complex situations throughout the film where the audience has to question just how bad this guy really is based on the world around him being so vile and corrupt. By doing this, they are provoking a dialogue about every decision Travis makes, in concert with every unusual interaction or act of violence he commits. Taxi Driver is a film that revels in living in the morally gray areas of life and forcing the viewer to place themselves in Travis’s shoes and answer some truly fascinating questions about themselves. It’s a film that is close to fifty years old and is as complex and brilliant now as when it was released. Add in the great Bernard Herrmann’s masterful score and Michael Chapman’s grimy depiction of New York City, and you have yourself one of the most important films in American cinema history. – RM

2. The Age of Innocence (1993)

Scorsese’s exquisite imagining of Edith Wharton’s novel, The Age of Innocence, sees the filmmaker tackling Gilded Age Manhattan, a New York environment far more elegant than the Little Italy of his small-time gangsters, but no less violent. Beautiful, sad boy Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) lives a staid, comfortable existence dictated by the rules of 1870s high society. He’s engaged to socialite May Welland (Winona Ryder), a kind woman who is innocence personified. When May’s cousin, Countess Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), returns to New York City after the dissolution of her failed marriage to a Polish Count, Newland finds himself on unsteady ground. He cannot break free of society’s rules and expectations, so he is intrigued by Ellen’s ability to live freely. Meanwhile, Newland’s buttoned-up persona and ability to keep his emotions repressed appeals to Ellen. Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer walk a white-hot tightrope as they dance circles around each other, knowing that the power of their onscreen connection is in the tension. They know how to beautifully hold everything back. The Age of Innocence also shows Scorsese’s strongest work as a documentarian, capturing the sumptuous period detail with care and precision. These images add texture and layers to a world desperate to maintain its carefully curated appearance. I used to think Scorsese was exaggerating a bit when he called this “the most violent film he’s ever made.” Now, it seems clear that he was showing his hand a bit and giving us clues for the types of violence that would be present in his later films (Silence comes to mind). The violence here may not be physical, but the internal heartache is everlasting. – SC 

1. GoodFellas (1990)

What makes GoodFellas so successful – what makes us return to it time and again – is how it invites us into a secret world of wiseguys and made men, of work-a-day criminals who steal, cheat, and kill to carve out their slice of the American Dream. That we identify so closely with its characters and rue their downfall is a testament to Scorsese’s skills as a storyteller, and his ability to reveal something about our darkest angels. His adaptation of Nicholas Pileggi’s book Wiseguy is told mainly through the eyes of Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), who confesses in the opening narration that, “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” He gets his wish, as he rises through the ranks of a mob family led by the stoic Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino) and his lieutenants: master thief Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and hotwire Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci). The film’s other narrator is Henry’s wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), who shows that the glitz and glamor of mob life has an equal allure for women. Scorsese tells this story at breakneck speed, peppering its brisk 145-minute runtime with little details of Mafia life that make us feel as though we’re part of the family. By the end, when Henry has entered the Witness Protection Program and has been reduced to dining on egg noodles and ketchup, we can’t help but pine for the life he’s lost, even though we’ve seen it comes at a price. – ZL