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How this ranking works
The order is a critical judgment, not a published consensus or an objective scorecard. For narrative films, the ranking considers how well the story and characters hold together, how distinctively the filmmaking serves them, and how much the film rewards revisiting. For documentaries and concert films, it also considers access to the subject, the shaping of archival material, and the way observation becomes a point of view.
![Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project No. 5 (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/515hptbQ5VL._SL160_.jpg)
![Martin Scorsese Collection (The Departed / Goodfellas / The Aviator) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51ZFrNVyOFL._SL160_.jpg)
![Scorsese Shorts (Italianamerican / American Boy / What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This? / It’s Not Just You, Murray) (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61rWZHWiv9L._SL160_.jpg)
The 27-title count comes from JustWatch’s U.S. guide, first published November 16, 2023 and updated June 15, 2026. It is one editorial scope, not a universal filmography rule: institutions distinguish documentaries from feature films, and different lists may handle shorts, anthology contributions, and television works differently. The Festival de Cannes profile, for example, labels No Direction Home and The Last Waltz as documentaries and has a separate feature-film section.
All 27 Scorsese movies, ranked
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Boxcar Bertha (1972)
Scorsese’s early Depression-era crime picture is rougher and less assured than what followed, but its restless energy makes it an interesting starting point. It lands last here because the characters and formal control are less fully developed than in his later work—not because an early, modest film has no value.
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New York, New York (1977)
This turbulent musical turns the conventions of a backstage romance into a study of ambition and incompatible temperaments. Its deliberate excess can feel uneven, but the stylized performances and musical world show Scorsese working beyond the crime-film mode.
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Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967)
Scorsese’s debut feature already carries the textures of his later New York films: Catholic guilt, neighborhood loyalties, and a young man wrestling with desire and conscience. Its episodic shape makes it less polished than the films above it, but the personal urgency is unmistakable.
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Bringing Out the Dead (1999)
Set across a night-shift ambulance route, this feverish film follows a paramedic worn down by death, exhaustion, and responsibility. Its disorienting momentum suits the character’s state of mind, even when that same intensity makes the film a less inviting rewatch than Scorsese’s most controlled work.
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Shutter Island (2010)
A gothic mystery built around a U.S. Marshal investigating a disappearance at a remote institution, Shutter Island is one of Scorsese’s most overtly genre-driven films. Its atmosphere and design are compelling; its puzzle-box construction can put the mechanics ahead of emotional subtlety.
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Silence (2016)
This grave adaptation follows Jesuit missionaries facing persecution in 17th-century Japan. Scorsese makes faith, fear, and moral compromise difficult questions rather than easy answers. Its patient form is part of its force, though the austerity asks more of viewers than his brisker films do.
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Hugo (2011)
A boy living in a Paris train station becomes the link between a family adventure and a tribute to early cinema. Hugo is one of Scorsese’s clearest demonstrations that his love of film history is more than a recurring reference: it is the emotional subject of the story. Its gentler register is a pleasure, even if it lacks the complexity of his strongest dramas.
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Gangs of New York (2002)
Scorsese reconstructs a violent, factional 19th-century New York through the rivalry between Bill the Butcher and Amsterdam Vallon. The scale and production design are striking, and Daniel Day-Lewis’s Bill dominates the screen. The film’s many ambitions do not always settle into one coherent rhythm.
Rank #2
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The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
This religious drama treats Jesus as a figure confronting human fear and the burden of his calling. Its willingness to explore doubt and vulnerability reflects Scorsese’s recurring interest in guilt, faith, and redemption. The film’s deliberate provocation is inseparable from its seriousness.
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The Aviator (2004)
Scorsese’s portrait of Howard Hughes traces the collision of creative ambition, wealth, and debilitating compulsions. The film’s period craft and energetic movement convey the scale of Hughes’s world, while its wide biographical sweep leaves some phases feeling more sharply drawn than others.
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New York Stories (1989), “Life Lessons”
Scorsese’s contribution to the anthology follows a painter whose creative life and romantic obsession feed one another. The segment is a compact, vivid study of artistic possession and performance. It is ranked as one entry in the 27-title scope used here, although anthology contributions are one reason film-counting rules can differ.
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After Hours (1985)
A routine night out in lower Manhattan becomes a comic nightmare of bad luck, strange encounters, and mounting panic. After Hours is one of Scorsese’s most tightly controlled films: its lean structure makes every new mishap feel both absurd and inevitable.
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The King of Comedy (1982)
Rupert Pupkin’s hunger for fame turns an entertainment-industry satire into an uncomfortable character study. The film is deliberately awkward and emotionally chilly; that distance is part of its insight into celebrity as both fantasy and entitlement. Its perspective remains distinct among Scorsese’s New York stories.
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Mean Streets (1973)
Small-time criminal life is the setting, but Charlie’s struggle with loyalty, guilt, and religious conscience is the real engine. The BFI identifies the film as a point where Catholic ideas of guilt, responsibility, grace, and redemption coalesce in Scorsese’s work. Its volatile style helped establish the personal intensity that would deepen in later films.
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My Voyage to Italy (2001)
This documentary traces Scorsese’s relationship with Italian cinema, connecting films he encountered to his own education as a viewer and filmmaker. It belongs near the middle of the ranking because its historical reach is valuable, though its essayistic, extended form is better suited to curious filmgoers than to someone seeking a quick introduction.
Rank #3
Sale![Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/516hA8KzkrL._SL160_.jpg)
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (The Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray]- Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
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Italianamerican (1974)
In this intimate documentary, Scorsese’s parents talk about family life, food, and their experience as Italian Americans. Its modest scale offers something his larger historical portraits cannot: a close, affectionate record of everyday voices and family memory.
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Casino (1995)
Las Vegas becomes a system of power, appetite, and eventual self-destruction in this expansive crime drama. Its narration and richly detailed world make it a formidable companion to Goodfellas, while the film’s sheer length and accumulation of excess keep it from feeling as perfectly balanced.
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Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)
Scorsese’s historical drama examines the murders of Osage people and the exploitation surrounding oil wealth in 1920s Oklahoma. Its scale and patient attention to betrayal give the story weight, and its moral center differs from the self-mythologizing criminals of many earlier films. The long runtime is a meaningful demand, not an incidental detail.
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Goodfellas (1990)
The rise and collapse of Henry Hill’s criminal life becomes a virtuosic account of seduction, status, and violence. The editing, performances, voice-over, and music make the world feel exhilarating before its costs become impossible to ignore. BAFTA’s Academy Fellowship interview reports 11 nominations and three wins for the film—Direction, Adapted Screenplay, and Best Film—at the time of that interview.
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Raging Bull (1980)
Jake LaMotta’s boxing career is only one part of this stark portrait of jealousy, violence, and self-sabotage. The black-and-white imagery and shifts in rhythm make the film’s physical and emotional brutality inseparable. It is among Scorsese’s most uncompromising character studies, though its punishing subject is not an easy watch.
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The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Scorsese turns Jordan Belfort’s financial fraud and appetite for excess into a blistering, often hilarious spectacle. Its velocity is exhilarating, but the viewer must decide how much the film’s intoxicating style exposes its subject and how much it risks sharing his seduction. That tension is a strength and a genuine point of debate.
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Taxi Driver (1976)
Travis Bickle’s alienation unfolds through a nocturnal New York that feels both observed and distorted by his mind. The film’s point of view is its power and its warning: it draws viewers into a troubled consciousness without making that consciousness a reliable moral guide. Bernard Herrmann’s score and the film’s visual atmosphere remain central to its unease.
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Italianamerican (1974)
Family testimony, memory, and a recipe shared on screen make this documentary feel less like a formal biography than a visit with the director’s parents. Its placement above the major fiction features reflects a particular strength: it preserves human detail without turning its subjects into symbols. The ranking’s scope lists it once, as one of the 27 selected titles.
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The Last Waltz (1978)
Scorsese’s concert documentary captures The Band’s farewell performance as both a musical event and a carefully shaped film. Its performances and guest appearances give it breadth, while the camera work makes the concert feel cinematic rather than merely recorded. For a documentary-focused reader, it is one of the most natural entry points into Scorsese’s work.
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The Age of Innocence (1993)
Edith Wharton’s novel becomes a study of desire constrained by social rules in 19th-century New York. The film’s precision—its costumes, narration, and measured compositions—shows Scorsese’s command of a romantic period drama, a mode he said he had long wanted to explore. In a 1994 BFI Sight and Sound interview, he connected the project to reading Wharton after the long struggle to make The Last Temptation of Christ.
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A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995)
This documentary is both a guided history of American cinema and a personal account of the films that shaped Scorsese. It earns a place near the top because it turns cinephilia into a generous act of teaching: viewers encounter not just selections from film history but the connections an observant director sees between them.
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The Departed (2006)
A crime thriller about undercover identities and institutional corruption, The Departed combines a propulsive plot with Scorsese’s recurring interests in loyalty, violence, and betrayal. Its momentum and ensemble make it one of his most accessible major films, while its tragic endpoint gives the entertainment a harder edge.
Where to start with Scorsese
- For a fast, gripping introduction: start with Goodfellas or The Departed.
- For a defining character study: choose Taxi Driver or Raging Bull.
- For a documentary: try The Last Waltz for music, or A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies for film history.
- For a different side of the director: watch The Age of Innocence for romance and period drama, or Hugo for a family adventure shaped by cinema history.
- For a religious and philosophical drama: consider Silence or The Last Temptation of Christ.
Scorsese’s range is not a detour from his central concerns. The American Film Institute’s retrospective identifies recurring interests that include loyalty, violence, religion, crime, and movies, while the BFI overview highlights guilt, responsibility, grace, and redemption. His work also includes documentaries, concert films, romantic drama, period drama, and children’s adventure. A useful watch order follows the kind of experience you want, rather than assuming that only the crime films count.
Why documentaries belong in the ranking
Scorsese’s documentaries are not side notes to a fiction-film career. Italianamerican looks closely at family memory; The Last Waltz shapes a concert into a film; and A Personal Journey and My Voyage to Italy make film history personal. The BFI’s career overview discusses these nonfiction works alongside his fiction films, and Cannes explicitly identifies some of his work as documentary. They call for slightly different measures—access, performance capture, archival construction, and point of view—but deserve to be judged as authored films.
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That attention to film history also extends beyond his own screen work. The AFI retrospective notes Scorsese’s involvement with The Film Foundation, reflecting a commitment to film preservation as part of his engagement with cinema’s past.
Quick Recap
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