Currently continuing his astonishing late-career run of masterworks with the just-released crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese stands as the last, best hope for cinema. There isn't another guy going out to bat for the cinematic experience with the same vigour, urgency and purpose — and this is an 80-year-old we're talking about.
Aside from his own masterful oeuvre of awards-winners and Robert De Niro-starrers, he has been at the forefront of movie preservation since the '90s with the Film Foundation, which he co-founded with the object of ensuring cinema’s survival for future generations. A prescient move ahead of cinema's present era, dominated by superhero movies (read: “theme park rides,” per the big man) and home streaming, chipping away at the allure of the big screen experience.
But what of his own movies? Truthfully, with 26 narrative films in total since 1967 — when he made his narrative debut, Who's That Knocking At My Door, as a student in New York — he hasn't made a bad one. Nor has he boxed himself into a particular genre or stylistic approach, so much as lazy commentators like to insist that he's just the “mob movie guy.” By our count, only six of his 26 movies, a sniff over a fifth, are out-and-out gangster flicks.
So yes, he might be the king of the crime film, a reputation he has resolutely concreted with his aforementioned late-career run, The Irishman and Killers of the Flower Moon standing as two of the greatest American crime epics committed to celluloid. But he's also more than that. There’s the Catholicism he still devoutly believes in. The loners, the freaks and the weirdos, and the great dirty metropolis that is New York City itself. There’s a penchant for period films and doomed romances. And, yes, there’s quite a bit of De Niro.
It's a bitch to sort from best to “worst,” not least because there isn't really a “worst.” With Killers of the Flower Moon now in cinemas, here's GQ's attempt at sorting through the lot.
26. Boxcar Bertha (1972)
The then 28-year-old Scorsese’s second picture had all the thrilling violence of his later masterpieces, if considerably less of the style, and it boasted some pretty solid Hollywood names. David Carradine and his real-life partner Barbara Hershey starred as the two leads – train robbers on the run in the 1930s American South, Bonnie And Clyde-style – and legendary producer Roger Corman ran things behind the scenes.
25. Who’s That Knocking At My Door (1967)
Not only Martin Scorsese’s directorial debut, but also Harvey Keitel’s first theatrical role, Who’s That Knocking At My Door already featured that classic Scorsese theme of Catholic guilt, albeit half a century ago and in black and white. It’s a relatively self-contained story: a young Italian-American man, JR, is troubled when he finds out his new girlfriend isn’t a virgin as he imagined, because she was raped by a previous boyfriend. Today, we have a broader terminology for this sort of subject matter – it would be classed as toxic masculinity or a real pig-headed, insecure machismo. For a film from 1967, it strikes a brilliantly nuanced balance between exploring JR’s ingrained, chauvinistic reaction and refusing to endorse it.
24. The Aviator (2004)
The Aviator is one of Scorsese's more overtly stylised movies, with odd-looking colour grading designed to evoke his own childhood nostalgia for the films he grew up with. Like those of Howard Hughes, the multi-hyphenate filmmaker-plane-obsessive portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio here. It's a deep character study of an obsessive: over the technical craft of his films, like the high-flying Hell's Angels, a pioneering aeronautical war epic for which he shot the barrel rolls and dives of actual planes (more than a few stuntmen perished, as did his savings); over the women in his orbit, actresses like Katharine Hepburn; and, indeed, his obsessive compulsive disorder, which came to dictate Hughes' life and see him spiral like a careening biplane. Still, a slow watch.
23. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974)
Led by an Oscar-winning performance courtesy of Ellen Burstyn, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is Scorsese’s comic take on the road movie genre. Alice, played by Burstyn, drifts haplessly but inexorably across the southwest US, from New Mexico to Monterey, California, after her husband dies, taking on various odd jobs and encountering a decidedly mixed bag of 1970s men in the process.
22. Bringing Out The Dead (1999)
Nicolas Cage considers this, arguably Scorsese's most under-appreciated film — certainly at the time, resolutely rejected by most of the establishment critics, aside from long-time Scorsese evangelist Roger Ebert — to be one of the best of his career. It famously made just half of its budget back at the box office. Not that Scorsese had been a stranger to audiences not immediately clicking with his movies; 1982's The King of Comedy, one of his best and most eminently rewatchable films, also flopped monetarily and was decried by Entertainment Weekly as the flop of the year. Present reappraisal of Bringing Out the Dead doesn't quite elevate it to comparable heights — this isn't a definitive Scorsese by any means — but it's absolutely worth the watch, not least with Cage back on the up.
21. New York, New York (1977)
This, the all-singing, all-dancing costume musical with Liza Minnelli and De Niro dedicated to Scorsese’s hometown, was somehow the film he made after Taxi Driver. Scorsese cashed in some of the industry goodwill he had won with his previous film in order to experiment a little, conceiving of New York, New York as a break from his darker, grittier subject matter, but it was not a success, only just breaking even and leaving critics confused. Now it stands as more of a testament to the creativity and bravery of the man – rather than make “Taxi Driver 2”, he swung wildly away to try something new, even if it didn’t quite land.
20. Hugo (2011)
The one family film among Scorsese’s work (at least explicitly – you can show your ten-year-old Taxi Driver if you really want…), Hugo was a lush exercise in charm with a typically Scorsese film-nerd angle. A young Asa Butterfield plays orphan Hugo, a Parisian urchin who lives in the Gare Montparnasse until he encounters a mystery involving his late father and the early filmmaker Georges Méliès. As such, the film acts as a tribute to the pioneering directors of the 1910s and 1920s, many of whose work Scorsese’s own charity, The Film Foundation, is dedicated to preserving.
19. Silence (2016)
There are few films that capture pure and total isolation with nothing but faith for comfort like Silence. Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel about the Jesuit priests who travelled to Japan in the 17th century to convert the populace to Roman Catholicism, only to be met with extreme brutality, was a 20-plus-year passion project for the director. It was worth the wait; Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield are brilliant as the zealous young missionaries whose faith is tested as they are hunted through the misty, hardscrabble coastal villages of feudal Japan.
18. Cape Fear (1991)
Robert De Niro’s vengeful ex-con Max Cady in Cape Fear is one of the great central characters in the Scorsese oeuvre and easily the driving force behind Cape Fear (De Niro was so dedicated to the role that he had his teeth filed down at his own expense to make himself look more threatening, then had them restored after filming). Much of the film’s conflict – between Cady and the well-to-do court-appointed lawyer he believes did not do enough to keep him out of prison – is prescient as to grievances felt keenly in America today. In showing the comeuppance of elites who are arrogant enough to pass judgment on their peers, and the unexpected fragility of the institutional power they wield, it’s the ultimate story of a criminal outsider viciously assaulting a system he sees as tilted forever against him.
17. Gangs Of New York (2002)
Scorsese’s first collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio is also the earliest incarnation we ever see of his beloved New York in a film directed by the man. In 1863, it’s a muddy clapboard slum riven by brutal factional fighting between Irish Catholic immigrants and the Protestants who have lived there for generations. When the moustachioed leader of the Protestant gang, Bill The Butcher (played with a touch of the absurd by an utterly terrifying Daniel Day-Lewis), knifes his dad to death in a mass brawl, young Leo sets out for revenge. The resultant film is a gory, nasty piece of work. But one does wonder what it would've looked like had Scorsese's direction not been infamously stymied by studio interference (a certain Harvey Weinstein, who made Marty flip a desk in frustration at Weinstein's mundane notes). Points docked, too, for almost causing Scorsese to quit filmmaking entirely.
16. Shutter Island (2010)
Does Shutter Island have the best — or worst, depending on who you ask — plot twist since the turn of the century? Another Marty-Leo collaboration, it’s that rare beast: a scary movie with half a brain. Balancing on the rusty knife edge between psychological thriller and out-and-out horror, with a dose of film noir thrown in for good measure, the film sees a detective in 1950s New England travel to a remote island asylum to try to solve the case of a missing woman committed after drowning her own children. Things quickly get as creepy as that synopsis makes them sound.
15. The Last Temptation Of Christ (1988)
Whatever claims to fiction it might make, it’s the Gospels, as a film; storytelling doesn’t get much more ambitious than that. Despite help from a Paul Schrader script, The Last Temptation Of Christ might have been too much even for Marty Scorsese to take on and almost three hours of scourging, crucifixion and “what ifs” about the life of Jesus later, it’s hard to feel anything but drained. Nonetheless, it was a bold undertaking that took real courage to attempt (Scorsese received death threats and there was even a fundamentalist Christian terrorist attack on a cinema showing the film in France). It’s probably not a film that would be made today for fear of causing offence. That, in itself, is a pretty commendable artistic undertaking.
14. Kundun (1997)
Scorsese has long been interested in faith and spirituality and from this point of view his decision to make a sympathetic biopic of the 14th Dalai Lama makes a little more sense to anyone more familiar with the wise guys, boxers and corrupt elites who otherwise populate his films. Kundun was so unpopular with the Chinese government that it got Scorsese banned from visiting the country, apparently, and Disney, its distributors, soon got cold feet when faced with being frozen out of such a gargantuan market. Ever-principled CEO Mike Eisner was dispatched to swiftly denounce the film and Sino-Disney relations were restored.
13. The Color Of Money (1986)
The battle of wits between Paul Newman and Tom Cruise’s respective pool hustlers in The Color Of Money was more than just that: it was one Hollywood golden boy passing the baton to the next, as Scorsese set up Newman and Cruise to outdo each other to great effect. Muscular, hammy and occasionally vulgar like all the best 1980s flicks, The Color Of Money is a lot of fun.
12. The Departed (2005)
Astoundingly, The Departed represents Scorsese’s only personal Oscar win from 14 nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Director (of course, actors in his films have won dozens). Even for its shortcomings — read: the scene at the end with the rat running across the wall in front of the Boston skyline, because it's a city awash with vermin, aha! — one can understand why The Departed was the one to get Scorsese over the Academy's line. Everything is tight and punchy in its rat-versus-rat (so many rats) set-up, as the Boston Police Department and Irish mob try to race to uncover moles in their respective organisations. Based on the also excellent Hong Kong movie Infernal Affairs, but with added dick-swinging, foul-mouthed Bostonian cops and Southie mobsters who are only slightly less uncouth, it also has one of the best “guy says the name of the movie during the movie” moments in cinema.
11. Casino (1995)
Roughly the midpoint of Scorsese’s career, Casino is a film that seems to pull its various elements from a number of other Scorsese movies, while foreshadowing others to come. Even before The Departed, it proved that Scorsese’s crime schtick could work when transplanted to a different locale from the Five Boroughs – in this case, Las Vegas. Even before The Irishman, Scorsese was expressing an interest in the teamsters union, whose pension fund was embroiled in the real-life casino skimming operation that Casino is based on. And then there’s the whole “crime might pay but it will destroy your relationships” angle that ran through Goodfellas, but which Scorsese leaned into more heavily here, as De Niro’s mobster, Sam Rothstein, falls for Sharon Stone’s stripper Ginger McKenna while running his Vegas establishment for the Chicago Outfit. Not as well regarded when it came out as Goodfellas, there’s a growing chorus of voices who would now claim Casino is actually the better film.
10. The Age Of Innocence (1993)
Scorsese revels in the luxury of Gilded Age New York, swapping the usual smoky streets and alleyways of the city for a world of crushed velvet, oil paintings and elbow-length kid gloves. That swap worked, helped not inconsiderably by the considerable talents of its central trio, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Winona Ryder. And The Age Of Innocence is the best proof of what we always knew: that whether he’s making a film about the mob or about 1870s upper-class courtship, there’s a secret streak of the romantic to Scorsese.
9. Mean Streets (1973)
Mean Streets is the early, proto-Scorsese blockbuster in many ways. All the requisite ingredients are there, namely the New York mafiosi who grapple with the morals imposed by their rigid Catholicism, played by two of the three big-name actors the director worked with in the first half of his career. In this case, it’s Keitel and De Niro who star (Al Pacino is sadly absent). After the boilerplate sex and violence of Boxcar Bertha and the low-budget personal piece Who’s That Knocking At My Door, Mean Streets was the first time Scorsese found his own voice and had the cash to match it. He didn’t disappoint.
8. After Hours (1985)
Deeply underrated. After Hours is a screwball 1980s comedy, part of a retroactively anointed genre movement known as the “yuppie nightmare cycle” – Google it – that would see a Reagan-era hotshot thrown into various barely believable nightmare scenarios one after the other, usually over the course of 24 hours or so. (Other examples: John Landis' Into the Night, 1988's nuclear nightmare Miracle Mile.) Here, it’s a man named Paul, whose post-work date with a woman leads to his being threatened, assaulted and eventually even turned into a living statue. It sounds weird; it is. It also rocks. Fans of the Safdies (Uncut Gems, Good Time) or just down-and-dirty nocturnal dramas about how crazy the city becomes when everyone's meant to be asleep will find a perfect drinking buddy in After Hours, and if there’s a Scorsese film you haven’t seen on this list, but which you should, it’s probably this one.
7. Goodfellas (1990)
There had been sweeping, multigenerational mafia epics before this, The Godfather being the very obvious example, but it was Goodfellas that finally realised the beautiful truth that mob stories could be told just as effectively as soap operas or Shakespearean tragedies. Scorsese took us into the heart of the Lucchese crime family and made it exhilarating, stupidly fun, dangerously macho... In fact, with the talents of (among others) “funny guy” Joe Pesci, it was hilarious at times and hilarity wasn’t a word that had been associated with gangster flicks much before Goodfellas.
Whether it was chopping up garlic in a roomy prison cell with a razor blade and enjoying a glass of red wine or elaborately celebrating a wedding (replete with gaudy envelopes of cash), Scorsese made life in the mob look like a blast. Though, let's be clear, Goodfellas hardly rings as endorsement of the wise guy lifestyle (maybe it should've been called — clears throat — heh, Badfellas!). It's one of Scorsese's most under-acknowledged values as a filmmaker, after all: he lulls you in with his exciting capers, what might seem on the surface a romanticised endorsement of amorality and ill-gotten gains, but the important thing for him is the complexity of his characters. Like Ray Liotta's Henry Hill, a self-possessed egotist whose charisma, he learns, can only take him so far.
6. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Based on David Grann's book-length reportage on the slow genocide of the Osage Nation, an Indigenous American tribe, for their oil-rich land at the hands of white settlers, Killers of the Flower Moon is a gargantuan work. In length, sure — it's three-and-a-half-ours long — but it's also staggering in scope and form, not least if you see it on the big screen, which you absolutely should. We're introduced to the Osage through the Coyote eyes of Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a bumbling man just back from serving lunch on the World War I frontlines, who conspires with his devious uncle, bespectacled hat-wearer and respected local man William King Hale (Robert De Niro), to marry into Osage land rights and murder his eventual wife for sole ownership.
She takes the form of Mollie, portrayed by a mutedly magnetic Lily Gladstone — it's all in her eyes, soft, sad, determined — who watches her family, her community, deteriorate around her at the hands of Hale, Burkhart and his cronies, wondering the entire time if her allegedly loving husband is involved. Little does she know he's second in command. Killers serves as a heartbreaking reminder of a rotten moment in American history — just wait for that final scene — but also Scorsese's extended comment on the violence we turn away from, the people we dehumanise and denigrate.
5. Raging Bull (1980)
A rat king of entangled jealousies, sexual urges, desperate fury and violent rages (clue’s in the name), Raging Bull would easily be the best film of any other director’s career. It’s probably the best sports film ever made, if you accept that it’s really about sports, which is itself debatable. Yet Scorsese, addicted to cocaine in the run-up to the film’s production, thought it would be his last and he initially turned down the project even as De Niro repeatedly suggested he take a look at boxer Jake LaMotta’s autobiography with a view to adapting the book. After almost dying of a drug overdose, however, Scorsese relented and channelled his energy into Raging Bull; De Niro as LaMotta became a man sparring with his own troubles and inadequacies every time he stepped into the ring and the result was transcendent. Scorsese’s career was saved and the next 40 years are history.
4. The King Of Comedy (1982)
Rupert Pupkin spent much of his (fictional) existence in the shadow of fellow psychopathic Scorsese creation Travis Bickle until The King Of Comedy benefitted from renewed interest in 2019 with the release of Todd Phillips’ Joker. Phillips’ film owed many of its perverse nods and beats to Scorsese’s dark satire of celebrity culture, which followed Pupkin, a mediocre stand-up, in his delusional, obsessive quest to find fame on a late-night chat show. It severely flopped at the box office; Entertainment Weekly called it the biggest flop of the year, and critics at the time were tepid, to say the least. Perhaps it's the eery prescience — that and a scorching double-header of performances from De Niro and Jerry Lewis — of a movie that feels like a critique of Trumpian bluster, and relatedly, America's embrace of poisonous celebrity egotism (everyone can be a star in the U.S., even a pathetic sad sack like Rupert Pupkin), but nowadays it rings out as one of Scorsese's best.
3. The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013)
As we all learned from Goodfellas, the best films about criminals make you sympathise with them and pine ever so slightly for whatever it might be – the glamour, the thrill, the bank balance – about their life that appeals, before rudely pulling the wool from your eyes in the third act. The Wolf Of Wall Street did just that, tapping into that part of everyone’s brain that tells you, “Well, I know it’s technically illegal, but it looks like a lot of fun” with all the persuasive, manipulative force of a boxful of Quaaludes. It is, appropriately enough for two hours of pure, hypermasculine greed porn, one of the most pirated films ever. Consider that payback for all those doltish lads who for a couple of months went around thumping their chests and growling. On the plus side, it featured a huge amount of excellent 1980s brokerage pinstripe tailoring and plucked Margot Robbie from Antipodean obscurity, so we’ll let the humming thing slide.
2. The Irishman (2019)
The second-most recent Scorsese film was very much of its time, released on Netflix and arriving on the back of the director's comments on Marvel’s “theme park" movies. At the same time, there are elements to it that seem timeless, at this point – it starred De Niro and Pacino and employed epic, multi-generation storytelling about the personal cost of crime. We’d seen it before and we loved it anyway. Is it as good a gangster film as Goodfellas or The Departed? It's not just as good as them — it's better (digitally de-aged De Niro struggling to curb stomp a man notwithstanding). It's certainly the most psychologically rich of Scorsese's mob flicks, chronicling three men on the wane, pursing a violent path of tragic inevitability: that for all of the blood spilt, money made and friends double-crossed, eventually they'll be forgotten, left to fester in the corner of a room in a retirement home, their only comfort the light in the crack of the door. That Scorsese chose to direct this story as one of his final career statements makes it all the more profound a moving experience to watch. The last lesson from Scorsese: eventually guilt catches up with you.
1. Taxi Driver (1976)
What do you want us to say? It’s Taxi Driver, you should really know this. In a perfectly distilled vision of the filthy, crime-ridden New York of the 1970s, Scorsese has his central loner, De Niro’s Travis Bickle, seek existential meaning in an uncaring mass of concrete and engine oil. He comes to the eventual decision (to the extent that he ever really decides anything) to both assassinate a high-profile presidential candidate and rescue a child prostitute he encounters from her pimp.
It should never be the only measure of a film’s quality whether it is still “relevant” or “urgent” for filmgoers watching it 45 years down the line, but in this case it’s hard not to see it in that light. Bickle, the insomniac Vietnam veteran cast aside when society has no further use for him, is an angry husk of a man, who we might read in 2023 as a prototypical mass shooter or would-be neo-Nazi, if only he were to stumble into the right underground meeting or the right area of the internet. New York itself might have cleaned up, the brothels replaced by Starbucks and the dank dive bars charmingly scrubbed clean of any real edge, but that underlying darkness is still there in the shadows: the aggrieved Bickles are biding their time, waiting for the right moment to prove that, yes, violence is still what drives society forward.
