The Best Martin Scorsese Movies, Ranked

The cinephile as director

Scorsese is the canon's most self-aware inhabitant: a filmmaker who is also film history's most effective advocate, founder of The Film Foundation (which has restored over a thousand films) and author of a personal canon — his list of essential foreign films is one of this site's sources. That double identity runs through the work. The films are saturated with quotation (the Big Heat coffee pot in GoodFellas' violence, Powell & Pressburger's reds everywhere), and his career has functioned as a five-decade argument that American genre cinema and European art cinema are one tradition.

The canonical core is the street trilogy of collaborations with Robert De Niro. Taxi Driver (1976) — Palme d'Or, written by Paul Schrader in a fever of insomnia and loneliness — remains the definitive New Hollywood character study, its standing in the critics' polls (top 30 in 2022) still rising nearly fifty years on. Raging Bull (1980), shot in black and white when color stock's instability offended him, was voted the AFI's #4 American film ever; famously, it lost the 1980 Best Picture race to Ordinary People, a verdict no retrospective source has ever endorsed. GoodFellas (1990) repeated the pattern against Dances with Wolves — but took BAFTA's Best Film and entered the Registry, and its restless voiceover-and-needle-drop grammar became the default style of two generations of crime storytelling.

The late-career correction

The Academy finally squared its account with The Departed (2006) — Scorsese's first directing Oscar and Best Picture, won, with characteristic irony, for a genre remake of a Hong Kong thriller (Infernal Affairs) rather than for any of the canonical originals. The data on this page tells the same story at every scale: institutional recognition arriving decades behind critical and community consensus, then over-correcting. Ranked by composite score, his filmography measures like a one-man national cinema — awards, polls, registries and community canons all heavily represented, with the gap between "recognized in its year" and "canonized since" wider than for any living American director.