With The Irishman now streaming on Netflix, it’s time to look back at the best and worst of Martin Scorsese’s astounding career. Over the course of fifty years, few directors have defined American cinema so thoroughly and indelibly as Martin Charles Scorsese. The New York kid who previously considered becoming a priest before forming part of Hollywood’s post-studio system new wave of auteurs may be one of the most instantly recognizable directors working in the business today, aside from Steven Spielberg. It’s tough to overstate the influence and world-changing impact his filmography has had on the industry.
Everyone has been influenced by Scorsese (there’s a reason Todd Phillips decided to use his work as the stylistic basis for Joker.) On top of having won practically every major film award possible - from the Best Director Oscar to the Palme d’Or to Emmys, BAFTAs, Grammys, and the AFI Life Achievement Award - Scorsese is one of the key figures in film preservation. His World Cinema Foundation has helped to restore and preserve oft-overlooked masterpieces from world cinema. All this and we haven’t even covered his work as a producer of film and television, his support for indie directors, and his many documentaries covering subjects as varied as Bob Dylan, Elia Kazan, Fran Liebowitz, and the Rolling Stones.
The Irishman is Scorsese’s 25th feature film as director and it shows the auteur in fine form as he takes on some of his favorite topics and imbues them with the melancholy of aging and fear of irrelevance. The film holds an approval rating of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, a fond reminder that Scorsese is far from done at this stage in his career. It would be easy to say The Irishman is a new director peak for him but Scorsese has consistently raised the bar so high for himself that it’s tough to even gauge what is his best and what is his worst. Scorsese is in the fascinating position of never having made a truly terrible film, something that few of his contemporaries, such as Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola, can claim for themselves. Over 25 features, Scorsese has shown his oft-overlooked range in theme, style, and genre, moving gracefully from the stylistic bombast of the gangster movie to the quiet dignity of period drama. To make this process easier, our ranking of Scorsese’s films will not include his documentaries and will focus exclusively on his features.
25. The Color of Money
In 1986, it was something of a surprise to see Scorsese of all people directing a sequel, much less one for a film he didn’t even make himself. The Color of Money is a follow-up to 1961’s The Hustler and sees Paul Newman return to the role of pool hustler Edward “Fast Eddie” Felson. 25 years on from the first movie, Fast Eddie has retired but gets back in the game to teach talented player Vincent (played by Tom Cruise) how to beat the best at their own game. It’s not that The Color of Money is a bad film. It’s perfectly entertaining and Cruise and Newman made an endlessly charismatic duo, but it’s also clear that Scorsese’s personal touch is light from this project. The film mostly existed as a way for Paul Newman to finally win his Best Actor Oscar after decades of snubs, and fortunately, it did just that. This is Scorsese more as a hired studio hand than auteur, for better or worse.
24. Boxcar Bertha
Gene Siskel famously referred to Boxcar Bertha, Scorsese’s second film, as a “trashy movie” that “does not shock [but] merely depresses.” He’s not wrong: It is pretty trashy, but what would you expect from the pairing of 28-year-old Scorsese with legendary B-movie titan Roger Corman? Scorsese’s clearly having a lot of fun with this vague Bonnie and Clyde rip-off but it’s also a director still working with the training wheels on. It wouldn’t take him long to iron out the creases and take on these themes with much more skill and ambition.
23. Shutter Island
For much of the 21st century, Scorsese’s most prominent collaborator has been Leonardo DiCaprio. Their five films together have given the director some of his highest-grossing works as well as a new partnership to rival that of the one he has with Robert De Niro. Shutter Island is the weakest of that quintet, although it is not without immense ambition and memorable chills. Based on a book by Dennis Lehane, Shutter Island features an enviable all-star cast that includes DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Max von Sydow, Michelle Williams, and Jackie Earle Haley. This mind-twisting story of a traumatized U.S. Marshal called into a hospital for the criminally insane to investigate a missing patient has some truly terrifying moments but is also emotionally distant in a way Scorsese typically avoids. This is the director throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks but sadly not much does.
22. Who’s That Knocking at My Door?
Filmed over the course of several years, Who’s That Knocking at My Door was Scorsese’s cinematic debut, originally starting life as a student short film. From the beginning, you see many of his favored themes as a storyteller, including the Catholic Italian-American male experience in New York City. Harvey Keitel plays J.R., a young man floating through life who then falls for a beautiful girl with a terrible secret. Upon its premiere, Roger Ebert enthusiastically declared the film to be “a great moment in American movies.” He later walked back that moment of hyperbole but stood by his insistence that this Scorsese kid would go places. We all know what happened next! As it stands, Who’s That Knocking at My Door is not the greatest directorial debut in American cinema but it’s still a top-notch calling card for a talented guy with a bright future ahead of him.
21. New York, New York
What do you do when you’ve made Taxi Driver and are looking for your follow-up movie? You make a musical! New York, New York was a curious choice for Scorsese and it’s clear that his ambitions got the better of him on this one. Robert De Niro plays a small-time saxophone player who falls for a USO singer, played by Liza Minnelli. Their relationship is messy, obsessive, and often deeply creative. It’s obvious that Scorsese has a deep love for the musicals of classic Hollywood and there are moments of real old-school razzle-dazzle, especially when Minnelli belts those Kander and Ebb songs (the title track, famously covered by Frank Sinatra, was written for this movie.) In Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls it is claimed that Scorsese’s cocaine addiction and difficulties in dealing with the often improvised dialogue were what sank the film, but New York, New York is still magical in those brief moments where everything forms a cohesive whole.
20. Hugo
Many of Scorsese’s films act as love letters to the history of cinema and nowhere is that more evident than in Hugo, his first real array into family-friendly entertainment. Kids may not have been as dazzled by this immersive journey into the world of pioneering filmmaker Georges Méliès (as shot in 3D!) but Hugo sees Scorsese at his most heart-warming and earnest. There are scenes where he goes full-on Spielberg with the emotions! Alas, what makes the film stumble is Scorsese seems to occasionally forget it was supposed to be, first and foremost, a kids’ film and he allows himself to be a tad overindulgent with his Méliès fandom. While Hugo is one of his sweetest endeavors, it’s also his biggest financial flop, grossing only $185.8 million from a budget of $150 - 170 million.
19. The Aviator
For many months in 2004, Hollywood was convinced The Aviator, Scorsese’s biopic of Howard Hughes, would be the one that finally cinched him that long-sought-after Best Director Oscar, but then Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby appeared and soaked up all the attention. It’s not hard to see why The Aviator attracted such attention. It’s easily one of his most conventional movies and the one that seemed tailor-made for a particular brand of middle-of-the-road industry prestige. Fortunately, the story gives Scorsese plenty of opportunity to show off his rich array of skills, all while showing off in the playground of old Hollywood. Hughes is a perfect match for Scorsese, a deeply difficult but brilliant figure whose hubris and demons quickly got the better of him. The Aviator is at its best when, as the title suggests, Scorsese lets rip with the astounding flying scenes. The scene where Hughes crashes his plane through Beverly Hills during a test flight gone wrong may be one of the best set-pieces Scorsese has ever executed.
18. Gangs of New York
It’s always better to have too much ambition than not enough, and the best exemplification of that as it pertains to Scorsese is Gangs of New York. The film famously went through some tough behind-the-scenes drama that involved producer Harvey Weinstein cutting an hour from its running-time and delaying its release a whole year (Scorsese himself called the production “nightmarish”.) Weinstein’s fingerprints are depressingly evident throughout the film, most obviously in the painful miscasting of Cameron Diaz (Scorsese wanted the less bankable but more fitting Sarah Polley for the part.) Still, Gangs of New York is the perfect subject matter for Scorsese: The battles on the streets of a newly evolving city, involving Catholic-Protestant feuds, Irish immigrant protests, and the gangs of Manhattan’s Five Points. For as messy and often exhausting as the film is, its grandeur and meticulous attention to historical detail make it worth your time. Daniel Day-Lewis is, obviously, electrifying as William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting, although many of the strong cast struggle with those Irish accents. For all its faults, its closing scene may be one of the truly perfect moments in Scorsese’s career.
17. After Hours
Scorsese spent many years in the 1980s developing one of his passion projects, The Last Temptation of Christ. After Paramount Pictures dropped the film, Scorsese decided to take on a smaller, looser movie in the form of After Hours, Griffin Dunne stars as a mundane office worker who the night from hell that includes burglars played by Cheech and Chong, a gang of punks, bagel paperweights, and a dead woman. This deeply and darkly funny comedy features a murderer’s row of sinfully underrated actors, including Catherine O’Hara from Schitt’s Creek. There’s a wonderful rough edge to After Hours that feels like the work of a much younger and freer director. Although it won Scorsese Best Director at Cannes, After Hours received mixed reviews upon its release and took a few years for people to appreciate it as one of the hidden gems in his filmography.
16. Cape Fear
Sometimes, restraint is overrated. Scorsese is capable of having the lightest of touches but now and then it’s oh so satisfying to see him go full balls to the wall. He does that and then some with his 1991 remake of Cape Fear. He and De Niro giddily embrace their showiest aspects and amp up the tension of the original narrative to new heights. Moreover, Scorsese made a wise but very precarious decision to increase the disturbing undertones of the original, especially in the subplot involving Juliette Lewis. Cape Fear is kind of disgusting but in the best way possible. Scorsese’s never been afraid to push buttons but the moments of true perversity in Cape Fear still shock to this day. All that and it helped to inspire one of the best ever episodes of The Simpsons!
15. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
In-between two of his most deliberately masculine films, Scorsese made a romantic drama about a widow looking for a better life. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is wonderfully tender but never sands over its more abrasive edges. For a director often accused of being blindly focused on the lives and pursuits of men, Scorsese shows off how exceptionally good he can be in telling a decidedly feminine story that’s unconcerned with appealing to male sensibilities. Ellen Burstyn deservedly won her Oscar for her leading role in this one. Scorsese has the range.
14. Bringing Out the Dead
On some level, despite him having helmed the movie, it’s not entirely accurate to refer to Bringing Out the Dead as a Martin Scorsese movie. More than anything else, it’s the brainchild of its screenwriter, Paul Schrader. The pair defined one another’s careers for many years thanks to their collaborations on Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, but Bringing Out the Dead is the dark horse of the pack. Nicolas Cage is in full-on Nic Cage mode here, playing an exhausted paramedic working the graveyard shift on an especially difficult night. It’s a feverish, often horrific journey into hell with moments of pitch-black humor and a kind of invigorating intensity that would easily have fallen apart in anyone else’s hands. Scorsese and Schrader challenge one another more than any of their other respective collaborators.
13. The Wolf of Wall Street
This is the movie where Scorsese’s collaborations with DiCaprio felt at its strongest and most re-watchable. The Wolf of Wall Street is overwhelming, frequently exhausting, and leaves a bad taste in your mouth, and that’s the whole point. The story of Jordan Belfort’s scheming and scamming is pure excess, a deep-drive into greed, hubris, and its ultimately crushing conclusion. The audience is carried away by the first rush of Belfort telling his over the top story and cannot help but want a piece of the action, but Scorsese smartly toes a fine line between depicting such alluring possibilities and reminding the viewer of its true cost. He shows the rot from top to bottom in the tainted ecosystem of Wall Street, one where the rich get richer and everyone else is exploited for every penny. Some have accused the film of glorifying Belfort but more than anything else, The Wolf of Wall Street is utterly damning in its condemnation of this world, the people who get caught up in it, and the institutions of power that allowed it to happen in the first place. This is easily DiCaprio’s best performance too, part grotesque yuppie, part pratfalling clown.
12. Casino
Coming five years after Goodfellas, Casino was unfairly maligned for apparently bearing too close a resemblance to its cinematic forefathers. Sure, this film is a veritable calling card of Scorsese’s gangster movie tropes, but the end product is still one of near-operatic force that stands on its own two feet. Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci reunite in this drama, inspired by a true story, centered on the sleaze of Las Vegas and the mafia-run casinos, with De Niro playing a gambling expert hired by the Chicago Outfit to oversee operations at the Tangiers Casino. What makes Casino especially worth your time is its relentless brutality - violent even by Scorsese’s standards - and the brilliant performance by Sharon Stone, who earned the movie’s sole Oscar nomination. You watch her in this and wonder why she didn’t get offered every role in Hollywood after this.
11. The Irishman
In many ways, The Irishman feels like a culmination of Scorsese’s entire career. De Niro and Pesci return to the fold for another tale of gangsters, hitmen, and the ultimate hollowness of this way of life. Much has been made about the film’s use of de-aging CGI but The Irishman is at its best when it is a movie about old men and their life’s regrets. Based on the possibly true story of Frank Sheeran, a mob assassin who claims to have been involved in the death of Jimmy Hoffa, the movie is frequently languid, bleakly funny, and steeped in melancholy. Never has a life in the mob seemed so empty and full of pain, devoid of anything remotely glamorous or aspirational. There remains a freshness through the film that serves as a reminder to all the younger filmmakers that Scorsese is here to stay and hasn’t lost any of his magic touch. The Irishman cannot help but make you excited for what’s to come.
10. The Age of Innocence
Following on from Cape Fear, Scorsese did a complete 180 turn and decided to adapt Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Audiences didn’t seem keen on the change of direction, as the film only grossed $32.3 million in the US from a $34 million budget, but for those who opened themselves up to it, The Age of Innocence is a startling and elegant piece of work. In what may be one of his most underrated performances, Daniel Day-Lewis plays a gentleman lawyer betrothed to a respectable young lady but who finds himself falling for her scandal-laden cousin. This is a story of forcibly restrained emotions and the price one pays to keep a stiff upper lip for the benefit of polite society. For anyone who insists Scorsese can only make big loud gangster movies, show them The Age of Innocence.
9. The Departed
With this 2006 remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, Martin Scorsese finally won his Best Director Oscar (one win in eight nominations.) Many film lovers have grumbled that The Departed would be the film to cinch him the statuette, especially since it’s a remake and the kind of film he could make in his sleep, but you cannot fault the exquisite detail and emotional force of this one. Could Scorsese have done this while in a coma? Probably, but that just makes it an even more amazing achievement. The plot, involving a mafia mole infiltrating the Massachusetts State Police and the officer assigned to deep cover in the Irish mob is like a Swiss watch in terms of its storytelling. Scorsese fully implants this story in the culture of Boston and its intersections of faith, justice, crime, and identity. Jack Nicholson may ham it up a little but DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Alec Baldwin give superb performances (with Mark Wahlberg exclusively delivering iconic one-liners) and help build the film’s deeply lived-in atmosphere. If any other director had The Departed in their filmography, it would be their undisputed masterpiece, but Scorsese has set the bar so high for himself that we must leave room at the top for more.
8. The Last Temptation of Christ
Given Scorsese’s penchant for themes of faith and doubt, it’s kind of a surprise it took him as long as he did to make a film about Jesus. Then again, The Last Temptation of Christ was controversial from the moment it was announced, so we can’t blame him for taking his time. Written by Paul Schrader and based on the novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the film depicts Jesus’s life as he struggles with temptation, doubt, and lust.
He knows his fate and what his sacrifice will mean to the world but he’s also a man who cannot help but yearn for a simple life with all its pleasures. Many accused Scorsese of sacrilege with The Last Temptation of Christ, particularly relating to the scene where Jesus imagines himself having a loving sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene, but that hysteria overlooked how deeply committed the film is to letting Jesus be more than a two-dimensional symbol. He is given a real-life and true emotions here, helped along by a stunning performance by Willem Dafoe. The Last Temptation of Christ challenges its viewers to do more than blindly swallow doctrine, which may be why various Christian groups boycotted the movie. If only they’d given it their time then they would have borne witness to perhaps the greatest film ever made about Jesus, faith, and love of God.
7. Mean Streets
After he made Boxcar Bertha, director John Cassavetes rather bluntly told Scorsese, “You’ve just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit.” He told Scorsese to go back to the ideas he took on in Who’s That Knocking at My Door, and the end result, inspired by things Scorsese saw in his real life, was Mean Streets. De Niro (in his first collaboration with Scorsese) and Keitel play two small-time Italian American crooks on the margins of the New York mob world. De Niro’s character is torn between his devout Catholic faith and the work he does collecting debts for his sleazy loan shark uncle. There’s a kind of urgency to Mean Streets that has kept it fresh for decades and never loses its heart-breaking emotional center. De Niro and Keitel’s chemistry, coupled with their deftly layered and fully formed characters, feels like the end result of decades of collaborations rather than the first time.
6. The King of Comedy
Another box office flop upon release that found its deserving audience later on, The King of Comedy feels decades ahead of its time as a scathing take-down of celebrity worship and the hypnotic evils of the American entertainment machine. The King of Comedy is prickly, often deeply uncomfortable, and frustrating in ways that many dismissed as pointless. However, there is something utterly impossible to ignore about The King of Comedy in how it shows broken people and the ways they cling to the manufactured joys of celebrity to survive. There’s a lot of Billy Wilder in this film, especially in its unrelentingly bleak take on American society, which may be why audiences were so turned off from it when it premiered. Joker may have tried to emulate it but the original is the truly timeless take on this oft-told story.
5. Kundun
There aren’t many films in Scorsese’s filmography that could be described as ignored but it’s a dubious honor for the 1997 drama Kundun. Written by Melissa Matheson, who had screenplay duties on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Kundun is a historical biopic of the life of Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Featuring a cast of complete unknowns and shot mostly in Morocco, the film was a massive risk. While the competition in his own filmography is tough, Kundun may be Scorsese’s most singularly beautiful film. With cinematography by Roger Deakins and music by Philip Glass, the entire narrative is a feast for the senses that creates a richly textured tapestry of not only the Dalai Lama’s life but of the struggles of the Tibetan nation under the invasion and rule of China. As is befitting Scorsese’s work, it’s also a moving ode to faith as an act of devotion but one that is seldom easy. Sadly, Kundun was crushed in part because its distributor Disney did little to promote the movie and after it got them banned in China for several years, they apologized for ever releasing Kundun in order to get back into the country’s good books.
4. Silence
Another long-time passion project for the director, Silence took two decades to get to the big screen and was easily worth the wait. Based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō, Silence is inspired by the true story of two 17th-century Jesuit priests who traveled from Portugal to Edo-era Japan to spread the good word of God while looking for their missing mentor at a time when Christianity was suppressed in the country. Fittingly for a story about martyrdom, Silence is often a deeply punishing viewing experience that reveals the ultimate price of faith and the conundrum that has baffled humanity for centuries: How do you commit yourself to something that can cause so much pain and doubt, with no guarantee that your faith is well-placed and no promise of true salvation? Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver excel as the priests who are put through the wringer for their devotion to God. This is Scorsese at his most Bergman-esque but he never lets go of his intrinsic skills or style, even as he slows things down to a near crawl and forces audiences to endure what he has to offer.
3. Goodfellas
For several generations of viewers, Goodfellas is the gangster movie to beat all other gangster movies. What is there left to say about the movie that countless critics and filmmakers have not already said? Even after it’s been endlessly parodied and its most iconic scenes ripped off or “homaged” by Scorsese, wannabes in the ensuing years, Goodfellas is still a near-perfect piece of filmmaking. It’s a fast-cutting endlessly energetic and completely explosive journey into an alluring world where the high points are near-stratospheric and the low points send you to hell. Aided by a brilliant screenplay and some choice ad-libbing, the film has a freewheeling quality that gives it a natural air amid its heavily stylized aesthetic. Everyone knows those memorable moments, from the opening lines to the tracking shot through the Copacabana to Joe Pesci’s “funny like a clown” rant, but the amazing thing is that they still feel exciting and fresh even on your hundredth re-watch (and it’s a film that remains re-watchable in a way few other movies do.) Scorsese’s dealing with a lot of tough themes here, as well as his undeniable warmth for these dangerous crooks, but he never lets them off the hook, even as he admits his grudging respect for them. The American dream has never been better explained and subverted than it has in Goodfellas.
2. Taxi Driver
43 years ago, Scorsese changed the game with Taxi Driver, the Palme d’Or winning psychological thriller about the isolated Travis Bickle and his mental descent into hell amid the grime of 1970s New York City. Like Goodfellas, it’s one of those movies that has become so instantly recognizable, with scenes that are the stuff of legend and many a parody. You can’t look away from this enthralling yet intensely disturbing tale and the man who comes to represent the worst aspects of a broken society. It remains Robert De Niro’s defining performance (it’s still a shock he didn’t win the Oscar for it.) So much of its hallucinogenic strangeness is left to be deciphered by the audience, and all these decades later, we still can’t figure out what’s real and what’s not, which is a true testament to Scorsese in every way. Watch Taxi Driver and see American cinema being rewritten for a new age.
1. Raging Bull
It’s a tough choice to make in ranking any one of Scorsese’s films as his absolute best but we have to give the top spot to Raging Bull. Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro reunite to tell the true story of Jake LaMotta, an Italian-American middleweight boxer whose talents in the ring were matched only by his self-destructive appetites in his real life. Thelma Schoonmaker, Scorsese’s long-time editor, is at her finest here, shaping the movie into a balletic yet potent force that captures the thrill of boxing in a way that countless films have tried and failed to replicate. This is the boxing movie that every other boxing movie in Hollywood strives to be (sorry, Rocky.)
However, its real power is not in the admittedly sublime boxing scenes but in its all-consuming portrait of a man who cannot control his demons, be they professional jealousy or psychosexual insecurity towards his wife. Roger Ebert called it “an Othello for our times”, the ultimate portrait of jealousy and its stranglehold over a man who could have been so much more. So, why is it Scorsese’s best? Raging Bull is the film that sees not only its director firing on all cylinders but its entire cast and crew. Nothing about this film lags or is left lacking. It’s a full-throated tragedy that thrills the audience as much as it brings them emotional pain. If Scorsese had decided to retire after making Raging Bull, nobody would have begrudged him. This is perfection in 129 minutes.
