Raging talent: Martin Scorsese's films ranked

Martin Scorsese was working as a sound mixer on John Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz when B-movie icon Roger Corman asked him to direct Boxcar Bertha because he’d enjoyed Scorsese’s previous film, Who’s That Knocking At My Door. In telling this story of a poor Arkansas woman in the 1930s (Barbara Hershey) who starts living out of hobo camps and traveling on boxcars after her father is killed, Scorsese is a bit out of his element. (To make Scorsese more comfortable in the film’s Depression-era milieu, the character of Rake Brown was rewritten as a New York gambler.) But his signature visual style and his later cinematic obsessions—corruption, violence, religion—found ways to exert themselves. Boxcar Bertha was Scorsese’s first Hollywood movie, and while it mainly holds interest as an early career curio, it did portend to his future: At the end of the shoot, Hershey gave Scorsese a copy of Nikos Kazantzakis’ book, The Last Temptation Of Christ. [Mark Keizer]

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Scorsese was famously a failed seminary student, but his thoughts on Catholicism would find their way into many of his movies, starting with his very first feature, Who’s That Knocking At My Door. Harvey Keitel makes his film debut as a devout Little Italy resident who insists on not deflowering his girlfriend until they are married but then leaves her after discovering she was raped by an ex-boyfriend. The film’s very first image is a porcelain rendering of Mary and the baby Jesus and its final montage contains shots of Christ on the cross, all of which Scorsese uses as blunt objects to wrestle with the conflicting impulses of faith, temptation, and guilt. Who’s That Knocking At My Door, which Scorsese shot on weekends while a film student, was originally titled I Call First and then earned U.S. distribution—and was retitled—after the distributor insisted on the addition of a sex scene. Almost everything Scorsese would become as a filmmaker was planted in this raw and real debut even if his point-making often feels a bit primitive. [Mark Keizer]

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With Kundun, Scorsese not only finds a new way to lionize the suffering of a religious figure threatened by those around him (see: The Last Temptation Of Christ), but he also finds a new filmmaking gear. The movie, which follows the 14th Dalia Lama (played by four unknown actors) from childhood until his exile in Tibet in 1959, is fastidiously unexciting, as if Scorsese felt that deploying his fierce and often brutish style to tell a story involving a religion other than his own would be viewed as disrespectful. As a result, the movie, despite the gorgeous lensing of DP Roger Deakins and the dissonant beauty of Phillip Glass’ score, is respectful to a fault. The heat barely turns up even when Mao Zedong begins enforcing tight control over the Tibetan people eventually leading to a bloody massacre. Kundun proves that Scorsese can work on an epic canvas, but without his signature character and storytelling crutches the overall effect is disappointingly stultifying. [Mark Keizer]

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We’ve seen a lot of legacy sequels recently, but this 1986 follow-up to the 1961 classic The Hustler proves that they’re nothing new. Paul Newman returns as Fast Eddie Felson, a role that earned him an Oscar nomination for best actor the first time around and a win this time. Newman himself approached Scorsese to direct The Color Of Money, hoping he’d bring the same sensibilities to it he’d demonstrated in films like Mean Streets and Raging Bull. Unfortunately, the paint-by-numbers script makes it feel like Scorsese was merely a hired hand, brought on to realize someone else’s vision. Newman is the driving force here as Fast Eddie, now a seasoned pro haunting pool halls and wondering if his best days might be behind him. When he encounters a young hotshot, played by Tom Cruise in his young hotshot era, with a big talent for pool and an even bigger ego, he decides to take him on as his protege. Predictably, they wind up facing off on opposite sides of the table, but in the end it’s the audience who feels like they’ve been hustled. [Cindy White]

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Sandwiched between two of Scorsese’s greatest films (Taxi Driver and Raging Bull), New York, New York had all the makings of a success, yet it never quite lives up to its potential. Just as Liza Minnelli and Robert De Niro’s characters in the film are individual powerhouses, each better on their own than they are together, Scorsese and the musical genre prove to be an equally mismatched pair. He seems to want to pay tribute to the classic MGM extravaganzas of old Hollywood, but can’t let go of his tendency toward grittier, more realistic fare. The result is a bizarre mishmash, with moments of soaring brilliance—Minnelli is incandescent whenever she performs—brought down by the darker tones of the volatile, doomed romance at the center of the story. Its most lasting legacy, for better or worse, might be the theme tune by Kander and Ebb, an anthem that’s become inseparable from the city that inspired it. [Cindy White]

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The teaming of Scorsese and noted wildcard Nicolas Cage achieves most of its fever dream potential in Bringing Out The Dead, which sees Scorsese back on creatively fertile turf, the streets of New York. Paul Schrader, who also wrote Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, adapted Joe Connelly’s 1998 novel chronicling the slow unraveling of a burned out New York paramedic (played in the film by Cage). Scorsese’s hyped-up visuals mimic Cage’s misery-fueled descent as he spends three intolerably tragic nights trying to save the city’s vampiric collection of hookers, dealers, and crime victims. John Goodman, Ving Rhames, and Tom Sizemore are all terrific as Cage’s shift partners. Patricia Arquette, as the daughter of a dying man, is the angel who may deliver Cage to salvation. Bringing Out The Dead was a money loser for Scorsese but it’s due for a reassessment. Cage’s ambulance is much like Travis Bickle’s taxi; they’re both vehicles meant to introduce us to New York’s damned and driven by men who can no longer tolerate the filth that swirls around them. [Mark Keizer]

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On paper, Gangs Of New York should be one of Scorsese’s crowning achievements. It’s an epic historical drama set amidst the gang violence that erupts in 1860s New York as Irish immigrants clash with descendants of American colonists. The tension eventually boils over, not just in the Five Points neighborhood where most of the film is set, but throughout the whole city as draft riots break out, culminating in a massive battle between the gangs, the police, and the military. The ingredients are all there for a passionate film with a fresh take on immigration, colonialism, and racism—so it’s really too bad that the script falls flat, lacking the nuance required to tie the film’s themes together with a strong thesis. It also doesn’t help that Daniel Day-Lewis acts circles around every other person in the film; he’s utterly captivating as Bill the Butcher. Leonardo DiCaprio and Cameron Diaz, both trying and very much failing to do Irish accents, can’t come close to the masterclass that Day-Lewis puts on. It all adds up to something that’s close to being a defining moment not just in Scorsese’s career, but in film history, but it ultimately buckles under the weight of its ambition to be the next Great American Film. [Jen Lennon]

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Scorsese had wanted to adapt Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel Silence since reading the book in 1989, and having taken so long to make it the movie represents his most recent foray into straight ahead religious inquiry since 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ and 1997’s Kundun. Of those three, Silence is the one that feels the most probing and personal, even if its investigations into faith, doubt, and sacrifice remain justifiably and powerfully inconclusive. The movie, in which two 17th century Portuguese Jesuit priests (Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver) search Japan for their mentor (Liam Neeson), who is rumored to have renounced God, is one of Scorsese’s most deeply felt. But it’s excessively long and hampered by a serviceable if sincere lead performance from Andrew Garfield. Still, unlike his gangster movies, Silence is less about physical violence than it is about spiritual suffering, which often cuts the deepest. [Mark Keizer]

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Sumptuous, dense, and unapologetically romantic, Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel is a feast for the eyes and ears. The sad tale of a man (Daniel Day-Lewis’ Newland Archer) torn between two women—one representing duty (Winona Ryder’s May Welland), the other love (Michelle Pfeiffer’s Countess Ellen Olenska)—gave Scorsese the opportunity to explore an opulent Gilded Age costume drama set among New York’s high society. Despite the fancy window dressing, The Age Of Innocence is one of Scorsese’s most understated films, befitting the social codes and mannered rituals of the era. In a world of restrictive propriety, even the touch of an ungloved hand can be as erotic as a fully realized love scene. No detail escapes Scorsese’s scrutiny. As the camera lingers on table settings, calling cards, flowers, cigars, and other symbols of wealth and privilege, you can’t help but feel transported. [Cindy White]

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After Hours might be Scorsese’s most disorienting and bizarre film. Set over the course of a single strange night in New York, Paul Hackett (Griffin Dunne) meets a woman at a coffee shop, goes to her apartment, leaves, loses all his money, convinces a bartender to spot him some subway fare, gets mixed back up with the coffee shop woman who has, in the intervening hours, died by suicide, and is ultimately mistaken for a burglar and chased by a mob throughout the city. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on paper, and somehow makes even less sense on film, which is exactly why After Hours is so arresting. It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in New York, and could only happen in the fuzzy hours after most reasonable people have gone to bed. It’s slightly tilted, just off-kilter enough to feel like it’s set in an alternate universe—but one which, with just one or two questionable decisions, we can all imagine stumbling into for one wild night. [Jen Lennon]

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Scorsese may not be the first director that comes to mind when you think “family film,” but he tried his hand at it with the charming clockwork adventure Hugo. Based on the illustrated book The Invention Of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, it follows the story of an orphaned boy (Asa Butterfield) who lives inside a Paris train station in the 1930s and ends up helping filmmaking pioneer Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) rediscover his love of cinema. For Scorsese, who suffered from asthma as a child and took refuge in the local movie theater, the character’s isolation and sense of wonder resonated deeply. It also gave him a chance to experiment with 3D filmmaking at a time when Hollywood was obsessed with the technology. Of the whopping 11 Oscar nominations the film received it took home five, including Best Visual Effects, and is still considered one of the best examples of the use of 3D technology in modern film. Even James Cameron agrees. [Cindy White]

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The problem with films built around twists is that they ultimately become only about the twist; it’s the thing that gets remembered in the public consciousness, even if everything else in the film is a hell of a lot more impressive that its narrative device. That’s what happened with Shutter Island, Scorsese’s psychological thriller set at a remote hospital for the criminally insane. Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo star as two U.S. Marshals investigating the disappearance of one of the hospital’s patients. The film is deliciously foreboding; you can feel the paranoia, the potential danger lurking around every corner. And even when it ultimately builds to a reveal that not just strains credulity but fully rockets over the line of believability and races off into the distance, it’s hard to care when the journey has been so good. Shutter Island is one of Scorsese’s most technically accomplished films; it’s a mood, a genre distilled to perfection by a master at the top his game. Shame about that twist, though. [Jen Lennon]

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Cape Fear was Scorcese’s first major commercial success, by a lot. It grossed $182 million at the worldwide box office in 1991, a total that wouldn’t be surpassed for a decade, with the release of Gangs Of New York in 2002. This remake of the 1962 thriller of the same name also holds a special place in pop-culture history, inspiring tributes, references, and homages in everything from The Simpsons to Seinfeld to Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Robert De Niro dominates every scene he’s in as Max Cady, a diabolical ex-con out for revenge against the defense lawyer he blames for his rape conviction and 14-year prison sentence. Nearly every moment he’s on screen is instantly iconic, from his prison workout routine to his loud, cigar-smoking antics in a movie theater, to “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Nick Nolte plays the targeted attorney, alongside Jessica Lange as his wife and Juliette Lewis as his teenage daughter. Scorsese even threw in cameos by Robert Mitchum and Gregory Peck as a nod to the original version. [Cindy White]

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It was Ellen Burstyn, coming off the success of The Exorcist, who suggested to Warner Bros. executives that a young and relatively unknown director named Martin Scorsese would be a good fit for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Impressed by Robert Getchell’s script about a widow who sets out on the road with her son to pursue her dream of being a singer, Burstyn called up her friend Francis Ford Coppola to ask if he could recommend a director. He suggested she watch a new film called Mean Streets and the rest is history. This low-key, edgy dramedy is often overlooked among Scorsese’s machismo-fueled filmography, but it shows promise in his kinetic camera work and the performances he gets out of Burstyn and the rest of the cast, including Kris Kristofferson, Diane Ladd, Jodie Foster, and Harvey Keitel. Burstyn would go on to win an Oscar for Best Actress that year, beating out, among others, Faye Dunaway for Chinatown and Gena Rowlands for A Woman Under The Influence. It also spawned the long-running TV sitcom Alice, which ran for nine seasons on CBS from 1976 to 1985, with Linda Lavin stepping into the title role. [Cindy White]

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The idea of a Howard Hughes biopic had been circulating around Hollywood for decades, attracting interest from the likes of Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, the Hughes brothers, Michael Mann, and Christopher Nolan before finally landing at the feet of Martin Scorsese in the early 2000s. He was the one to finally bring the project over the finish line as The Aviator, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead role of Hughes. An exploration of the duality between genius and madness, it takes us through the spectacular highs and disturbing lows of Hughes’ journey from aviation innovator to movie producer to germaphobic recluse. Scorsese paints the story in bold colors on a huge canvas, giving DiCaprio an opportunity to spread his wings literally and figuratively. Cate Blanchett also delivers an Oscar-winning performance in the role of Katharine Hepburn. The remainder of the stacked cast includes Kate Beckinsale, Ian Holm, John C. Reilly, Alec Baldwin, Jude Law, Gwen Stefani, Willem Dafoe, and Alan Alda. [Cindy White]

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The Wolf Of Wall Street is a film you have to take on its own terms. It’s told from the perspective of Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio), a corrupt stock broker who built an empire by defrauding his clients. Belfort is gleefully unapologetic about all of it: the crimes, the excess, the parties, the drugs. And so is Scorsese, as he unabashedly documents Belfort’s antics without ever imposing judgment on them. That’s a sticking point for a lot of people; some argue that the film celebrates its subject when it should be vilifying him. The Wolf Of Wall Street might be Scorsese’s funniest film to date, but staging it as a debaucherous comedy doesn’t let Belfort off the hook so much as highlight the absolute absurdity of everything that unfolds. [Jen Lennon]

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In The Irishman, Scorsese tackles one of the greatest mafia mysteries in American history: what happened to Jimmy Hoffa? It’s an intoxicating puzzle, one that, to this day, still has not been solved. But Frank Sheeran, an alleged hitman for the Bufalino crime family, claimed to have the answer in confessions recorded before his death. Charles Brandt documented Sheeran’s story in the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses, which is both a much better title than The Irishman and the source material for the film. (“Painting houses” is a euphemism for a hitman completing a contract killing.) Robert De Niro plays Sheeran, with Al Pacino as Hoffa and Joe Pesci as Russell Bufalino. The film spans roughly 50 years, and a lot of the buzz going into it focused on the state-of-the-art de-aging technology Scorsese utilized. In truth, Scorsese probably would have been better served by casting different actors to play younger versions of the characters, but it’s hard to deny the thrill of seeing three acting legends share the screen in a film that, for the most part, lives up to its premise. This is a gangster epic in every sense of those words; a monumental story with a running time to match, a feat of cinematic daring about one of America’s most sensational crimes. This is a master filmmaker distilling a lifetime’s worth of knowledge and experience into one of the only stories that could possibly sustain it. It’s a little messy, but hey—so is painting houses. [Jen Lennon]

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Scorsese seems to be holding on to some bitterness about the initial reception to The King Of Comedy, and it’s not hard to understand why. “The flop of the year. That’s what it was called,” he said in a recent video. “On Entertainment Tonight. New Year’s Eve, ’83 to ’84.” In the film, Robert De Niro stars as Rupert Pupkin, an unstable stand-up comedian who is obsessed with appearing on Jerry Langford’s (Jerry Lewis) talk show—and, by extension, with Langford himself. Pupkin’s fixation escalates after Langford rejects him, leading Pupkin to kidnap Langford and demand that he be given the opening spot on Langford’s show. Pupkin actually pulls it off, too; he opens the talk show and gets a warm reception from the audience. It would’ve been easier to turn Pupkin’s set into a failure; would’ve made for an easier narrative with a clearer moral. But The King Of Comedy defies expectations at every turn, leading to an in-depth examination of Pupkin’s deeply flawed psyche. It is distinctly uncomfortable, an itch deep beneath the skin, down somewhere in the bone and marrow, inaccessible but undeterred in its desire to make itself known. For both Scorsese and Pupkin, sometimes it’s hard to let things go. [Jen Lennon]

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Scorsese has played around with different genres, but his fascination with gangsters and criminals has kept him coming back to them again and again. The same could be said about his relationship to actor Robert De Niro. De Niro stars in seven of the top 10 films on this list, including this epic crime drama, which marked their eighth film together. Casino chronicles the rise and fall of Sam “Ace” Rothstein (De Niro), a bookie tapped by the Chicago mafia to run the fictional Tangiers Casino in Las Vegas. Sam’s sharp business sense and attention to detail, not to mention his fine collection of suits and ties, make him great at his job, but the two most important people in his inner circle prove to be his greatest weaknesses—his hotheaded childhood friend Nicky (Joe Pesci) and the faithless love of his life Ginger (Sharon Stone). The film was praised for its outstanding performances and insider look at Vegas at the height of the mobster era, though it suffered from comparisons to Goodfellas, which had come out just five years earlier. As David Spade once put it on Saturday Night Live, “Casino: Ca-seen-it already.” [Cindy White]

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Like most films of this type, The Last Temptation Of Christ was denounced and, let’s say, crucified by those who had not seen it. A small but boisterous subset of fundamentalists didn’t like the fact that Scorsese portrayed Jesus as your typical everyday sinner and not the Lord of lords and King of kings. They especially chafed against the extended dream sequence in which Satan gives the film its title by trying to tempt Jesus (an excellent Willem Defoe) into forgoing his divinity by making him imagine a future where he is an ordinary man. But the film’s enormous power comes from Scorsese challenging us to reconsider Jesus’ sacrifice from a mortal perspective, and he does it by stripping the film of that Sunday school earnestness and sanctimony that caters to those who prefer the platitudinous version of Christ’s story. The Last Temptation Of Christ is the uncompromising work of a believer in both man and messiah, and who is willing to let those conflicting impulses play out on screen. [Mark Keizer]

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Scorsese left behind his usual New York stamping grounds and shipped up to Boston for The Departed, the film that finally won him an Oscar for Best Director. It’s not that he didn’t deserve it; The Departed is an incredibly tense cat-and-mouse thriller about informants in the Massachusetts State Police infiltrating the Irish mob in South Boston (and vice versa), and Scorsese plays it like a chess grandmaster. But it is one of his most conventional films, and it’s hard not to feel like the award was a consolation prize after a lifetime of the Academy not really understanding his deeper and more complex character studies. The Departed largely eschews character work in favor of playing on human connection, keeping the audience guessing about the characters’ allegiances until the very end. Leonardo DiCaprio plays an undercover police officer who slowly gets in the good graces of the mob; Matt Damon plays a mobster who spends years working his way into the police department. It’s some of the best work of their careers, as both Damon and DiCaprio deftly convey suspicion and fear at every turn. It’s Oscar-worthy on every level—except when compared to some of Scorsese’s other films. [Jen Lennon]

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Scorsese exploded into our national cinema consciousness with Mean Streets, a film about a group of Little Italy tough guys that was—oddly enough—mostly shot in Los Angeles. Also shedding anonymity for the last time were Harvey Keitel as Charlie and Robert De Niro, who auditioned for the role of Johnny Boy wearing the pork pie hat he’d wear in the film. In the early ’70s, directors like Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin were foregrounding the grittiness of a decaying New York, but in his third film Scorsese took it to another level. The story is admittedly slight, but the resourceful and inventive camerawork, the rock and roll soundtrack, and the film’s grimy, lowlife authenticity give Mean Streets an electrifying urgency. Scorsese’s fascination with gangsters began here in a film where sin and Catholic guilt fight it out on the streets and no one comes out clean. [Mark Keizer]

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There’s something about the darkness that leads to a specific kind of genius in Scorsese’s work. In After Hours, he documented one bizarre night gone awry; in Taxi Driver, he examines a whole life gone awry. Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a nighttime New York City cab driver whose mental health deteriorates over the course of the film. Bickle is unsettling from the beginning, but it’s in a kind of ambiguous way; maybe it’s just the late hours that make everyone seem a little weirder and more dangerous. But as the film progresses, we see the extent of his obsession with violence, culminating in a shootout that results in Bickle being hailed as a hero. For the media outlets in the film, it’s an easy situation to frame without looking too deep beneath the surface. But Taxi Driver forces us to sit with Bickle and his disturbing thoughts, to see the circumstances behind his seemingly heroic act. Scorsese has always excelled at plumbing the depths of the human psyche, refusing to flinch or look away even when what he finds is deeply disturbing. Taxi Driver tapped into a particular kind of male rage that, as Scorsese told GQ, is still frighteningly common. It’s easier to pretend that people like this don’t exist, to look away when asked to contemplate their viewpoints. But if there’s one thing that’s been true throughout all of his films, it’s that Scorsese has never let his audience off the hook easily. And Taxi Driver never looks away from the horror. [Jen Lennon]

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Raging Bull is arguably Scorsese’s greatest all-around achievement, a film where script, performance, sound, cinematography, and theme all coalesce at their highest artistic levels to, ironically, tell the story of self-hating, brutish, and nihilistic middleweight champion Jake LaMotta. De Niro instigated the project after reading LaMotta’s autobiography and suggesting to Scorsese that he direct a film adaptation. He even heavily rewrote, with Scorsese, the script by Mardik Martin and Paul Schrader. De Niro followed LaMotta around for a year with a tape recorder, spared with him in the ring for over 1,000 rounds and famously gained 60 pounds to play LaMotta as a washed-up boxer who spent years absorbing blows inside the ring as penance for his sins outside the ring. Those sins include his treatment of his wife Vicki (Cathy Moriarty) who, along with Joey (Joe Pesci), are literal punching bags allowing LaMotta to unleash his deep and pathological reserves of jealousy, paranoia, and resentment. De Niro won a Best Actor Oscar for his ferocious lead performance while Scorsese delivered his first masterpiece, a savage look at masculinity at its most toxic. [Mark Keizer]

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Goodfellas gets the nod over Raging Bull here as Scorsese’s best film because it contains all the filmmaking bravura of his 1980 Oscar winner yet it’s also an eminently rewatchable seduction where the viewer acknowledges the danger of the gangster lifestyle but comes to envy it for its close knit sense of family and the prison meals that always include “a pasta course and then a meat or a fish.” Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book Wiseguys, Goodfellas is a black comedy in gangster garb, one that doesn’t shy away from the bullets and blood that are unavoidable components of this distinctly masculine subculture. Much as in Raging Bull, Scorsese becomes visually and aurally embedded in this world, whether it’s the famous three-minute Steadicam shot at the Copacabana nightclub or the rock soundtrack highlighted by the ironic use of Donovan’s folk anthem “Atlantis” while Billy Bats (Frank Vincent) is getting pummeled to death. As the hot-headed Tommy, Joe Pesci won the film’s only Academy Award, partially on the strength of his “you think I’m funny?” exchange with Ray Liotta which was not in the original script and was improvised by both actors. Goodfellas was not the first or last time Scorsese would immerse viewers in the world of gangsters, but here he makes us understand its appeal without romanticizing it, while also making it feel tragic, comical, and ultimately authentic. [Mark Keizer]

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