Directors
The Essential Martin Scorsese Movies, Ranked
Sixty years, more than twenty-five features, and one consistent subject: men who want to belong to something that is destroying them. Here are the fourteen that matter most.
Hero image: Goodfellas (artwork via TMDB)
Key takeaways
- Goodfellas is the most complete film and Taxi Driver the most influential.
- Almost every Scorsese protagonist wants to belong to a group that will eventually destroy him.
- The late work (The Irishman, Killers of the Flower Moon) is slower, sadder, and about consequences rather than momentum.
- Start with Goodfellas. Do not start with Silence.
Martin Scorsese has been directing features since 1967 and has made more than twenty-five of them, which makes a complete ranking unwieldy and slightly pointless. This is the essential fourteen: the films that define what he does, plus the late-career work that reframes all of it.
The through-line is remarkably consistent. A Scorsese protagonist almost always wants to belong to something, a crew, a church, a scene, a family, and the film is about how that belonging costs him everything, usually while he is enjoying himself enormously. The camera's energy is the seduction and the ending is the bill.
The top five
GoodFellas (1990)
- 2h 25m
- TMDB 8.5/10
- Drama, Crime
The most completely realised film he has made and the one that defined how American crime cinema looks and sounds for the next thirty years.
The Copacabana tracking shot is the most quoted sequence, and its purpose is frequently misread. It is not showing off. It is showing you exactly what the appeal of this life was, in one unbroken take, so that when the collapse comes you understand what is actually being lost.
The last forty minutes, a single cocaine-fuelled day cut to nine different songs with a narrator who is barely coherent, is one of the great technical achievements in editing. Thelma Schoonmaker's work across his filmography is enormously underdiscussed and this is her peak.
It is also honest about its own seduction. Henry's narration constantly contradicts what the camera shows, and the film's final shot is a man complaining that he has to live like everybody else.
Watch it if: you are starting with Scorsese. This is the correct entry point.
Taxi Driver (1976)
- 1h 54m
- TMDB 8.1/10
- Crime, Drama
The most influential film of his career and the most uncomfortable to sit with in 2026. Travis Bickle is a lonely, sleepless man who decides the city needs cleaning, and the film is scrupulously careful never to endorse him.
That care is what gets lost in its cultural afterlife. The film is shot almost entirely from inside Travis's perspective, with Bernard Herrmann's score sliding between romantic saxophone and menace, precisely so you experience his logic as it decays. It is not asking you to agree.
The ending, in which a mass shooting is misread by the press as heroism, is the bleakest joke in American cinema and it has only become sharper.
Paul Schrader's screenplay was written in a couple of weeks while he was living in his car, and it shows in the best way: it is raw in a manner that a more comfortable writer could not fake.
Watch it if: you want the film that half of modern cinema is arguing with.
Raging Bull (1980)
- 2h 9m
- TMDB 7.9/10
- Drama, History
The one most often called his masterpiece, and the argument is defensible. Jake LaMotta is a middleweight boxer with no interior life to speak of, consumed by jealousy he cannot articulate, and the film refuses to explain him or redeem him.
The fight sequences abandon realism entirely. Scorsese shoots them as expressionist nightmares, with the ring changing dimensions between rounds, sound dropping out, and flashbulbs exploding like gunfire. They are about how it feels to be hit, not about boxing.
Robert De Niro gained roughly sixty pounds for the later scenes, which became the famous fact, but the more remarkable work is in the early sequences where he plays a man whose only vocabulary for love is suspicion.
It is in black and white, it is 129 minutes, and it is a genuinely difficult watch. Nobody in it is likeable and that is the point.
Watch it if: you want his most formally daring film, and you do not need a sympathetic protagonist.
The Departed (2006)
- 2h 31m
- TMDB 8.2/10
- Drama, Thriller, Crime
His most purely entertaining film and the one that finally won him an Academy Award, twenty-six years after Raging Bull lost.
It is a remake of the Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs, relocated to Boston, and the structural premise is superb: a cop undercover in the mob and a mob plant inside the police, each hunting the other without knowing who they are.
What Scorsese adds to the original is texture and profanity. The Boston specificity, the institutional politics, and Jack Nicholson's Frank Costello turn a tight thriller into something sprawling and funnier.
At 151 minutes it moves fast, and the last twenty minutes are among the most abrupt in mainstream cinema.
Watch it if: you want the most immediately gripping film in his catalogue.
The King of Comedy (1982)
- 1h 49m
- TMDB 7.8/10
- Drama, Comedy
A commercial disaster in 1982 and now the most prescient film he ever made. Rupert Pupkin is an aspiring comedian with no act and total certainty that he deserves fame, who eventually kidnaps a talk show host to get a spot.
It is a comedy in which nothing is funny, shot flat and bright, with none of the kinetic energy his crime films have. That flatness is deliberate: there is no seduction here because Rupert's world is entirely in his head.
The final sequence, which leaves genuinely ambiguous whether any of it worked, predicted the entire relationship between celebrity, delusion, and audience that the following four decades would produce.
Its influence on later films about aggrieved men and fame is direct and openly acknowledged.
Watch it if: you want the film that understood parasocial obsession forty years early.
Six through ten
Casino (1995)
- 2h 59m
- TMDB 8.0/10
- Crime, Drama
Frequently dismissed as Goodfellas in Las Vegas, which is unfair but not baseless. Same director, same writer, same two lead actors, similar narration structure.
What makes it distinct is that it is about systems rather than people. The first thirty minutes are essentially a documentary about how a casino skims money, and the film's real subject is what happens when a business that worked on handshakes gets replaced by corporations.
Sharon Stone gives the best performance in it by a distance, and the costume work, reportedly over forty changes for De Niro alone, is doing genuine characterisation.
Watch it if: you loved Goodfellas and want three more hours of the same machinery.
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
- 3h 0m
- TMDB 8.0/10
- Crime, Drama, Comedy
His funniest film and his most misunderstood. Three hours of financial crime played as pure comedy, with no visible punishment and no moralising narrator.
The complaint that it glorifies Jordan Belfort misses the final shot, which turns the camera on an audience of people paying to learn his methods. The film's argument is that the system never punished him and that we are complicit in that.
DiCaprio's physical comedy in the Quaaludes sequence is genuinely extraordinary and completely unlike anything else in his career.
At 180 minutes it is exhausting by design, which is either the point or the problem.
Watch it if: you want to laugh for three hours and feel slightly complicit.
The Irishman (2019)
- 3h 29m
- TMDB 7.6/10
- Crime, Drama, History
The late-career reckoning, and it functions as a direct rebuttal to Goodfellas. Same world, same actors, and none of the energy, on purpose.
Where Goodfellas moves, this sits still. Where Henry Hill enjoys himself, Frank Sheeran is passive and largely silent. The digital de-aging drew most of the discussion and is the least interesting thing about it.
The final forty minutes are what justify the 209-minute runtime: an old man in a care home, alone, unable to explain himself to anyone who is left. It is the saddest thing he has made.
The famous shot of a door left ajar is the whole film in one image.
Watch it if: you have seen Goodfellas and want the answer to it. Give it a full evening.
Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
- 3h 26m
- TMDB 7.4/10
- Crime, History, Drama
A 206-minute account of the systematic murder of Osage people for their oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma.
Its most important decision was made late in development. The screenplay originally followed the FBI investigation, with DiCaprio as the agent, and was restructured to centre the perpetrators instead. That change is why the film works: it refuses to let a white investigator be the audience's entry point into a story about white people killing for money.
Lily Gladstone's Mollie is the moral centre and the film is careful about how much it lets you see of her interior life, which some viewers found withholding and which is arguably the point.
The final scene is one of the boldest choices of his career and reframes the whole film as an argument about who gets to tell this story.
Watch it if: you want his most morally serious late film and you have three and a half hours.
Mean Streets (1973)
- 1h 52m
- TMDB 7.0/10
- Drama, Crime
The film where the voice arrives. Made in 1973 for almost nothing, largely in Little Italy where he grew up, and it contains in embryo nearly everything he would spend fifty years developing.
Harvey Keitel is a small-time operator trying to reconcile Catholic guilt with a life that guarantees more of it, and De Niro is the reckless friend who will destroy him. The tension between the church and the street is the most autobiographical thing in his work.
The use of pop records over violence, the handheld camera in bars, the improvised dialogue: all of it starts here.
Watch it if: you already like him and want to see the source code.
Four more essentials
Shutter Island is his full-blown gothic, and the final line is the reason to watch. The Aviator is a genuinely great biopic about Howard Hughes that is more interested in obsessive compulsive disorder than in aviation. Silence is his most personal and most punishing film, about Jesuit missionaries in 17th-century Japan, and it is the one to save until last. And After Hours is a 97-minute black comedy about one catastrophic night in SoHo, and it is the funniest, weirdest, and least characteristic thing he has ever made.
Where to start
| If you want | Start with | Runtime |
|---|---|---|
| The best entry point | Goodfellas | 145 min |
| The most gripping | The Departed | 151 min |
| Something short | After Hours | 97 min |
| The most important | Taxi Driver | 114 min |
| The funniest | The Wolf of Wall Street | 180 min |
| The late, sad one | The Irishman | 209 min |
The recurring machinery
Watch five in a row and the technique becomes obvious. Voiceover narration that is unreliable and knows it. Long unbroken takes used to seduce rather than to show off. Pop records placed against violence so that the violence feels casual. Freeze frames. Catholic guilt in men who have never been to confession. And an ending that removes everything the film spent two hours making look enjoyable.
The seduction is the technique that people argue about, because it means his films about terrible men are genuinely fun for long stretches. That is not an accident or a failure of nerve. A film that made crime look miserable from the first frame would have nothing to take away from you at the end.
For more, our Tarantino ranking covers the other great American chronicler of criminals, best movies based on true stories covers Goodfellas and Killers of the Flower Moon in that context, and the crime catalog has the wider list.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best Martin Scorsese movie?
Goodfellas is the most complete and the best starting point. Taxi Driver is the most influential and Raging Bull the most formally daring. All three are defensible answers.
Which Scorsese film should I watch first?
Goodfellas. It is the most representative of his technique, immediately gripping, and 145 minutes. The Departed is the alternative if you want a more conventional thriller structure.
How many films has Martin Scorsese directed?
More than twenty-five narrative features since 1967, plus a substantial body of documentaries. This list covers the fourteen essential ones rather than attempting the complete filmography.
Is The Irishman worth the runtime?
If you have seen Goodfellas, yes. At 209 minutes it is deliberately slow and its final forty minutes are the payoff: it functions as a direct rebuttal to the energy and pleasure of his earlier crime films.
Does The Wolf of Wall Street glorify its subject?
It shows the life as enormously fun for three hours, which is the technique he uses in every crime film. The final shot turns the camera on an audience paying to learn Belfort's methods, which is the film's actual argument.
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Ratings, runtimes, and artwork come from TMDB and can change over time. teasertrack is a free discovery site, not a streaming service: every pick links to its full movie page where you can check trailers, cast, and current availability.
