The Best Martin Scorsese Movies, Ranked By True Cinephiles

The Master Plot: Henry Hill begins working for local mobster Paulie Cicero as a teenager and over the years climbs up the ranks of the organization, often working in tandem with Jimmy Conway and Tommy DeVito. Hill and his wife get caught up in the exciting if dangerous lifestyle, which expands to include drug dealing. Hill develops a drug habit of his own and becomes paranoid that Jimmy will have him murdered to cover his tracks in the epic Lufthansa heist that he orchestrated. He decides to become a government informant, and his testimony results in Paulie's and Jimmy's convictions. He and his family go into the witness protection program, but Hill is unhappy over the loss of his exciting lifestyle.

Standout Scene: The famous ‘Copacabana’ scene, filmed in a single continuous Steadicam shot, best illustrates how seductive the gangster lifestyle is and how both Hill and Karen could have been easily caught up in it. Also memorable is the scene, toward the end, where a paranoid Hill believes the feds are following him in a helicopter. 

Critical Reception: Scorsese earned his third Academy Award nomination for Best Director for his work on Goodfellas. That was one of the six Oscar nominations the film received, including one for Best Picture, with Joe Pesci winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film, which was based on the life of real-life mobster-turned-informant Henry Hill, received overwhelming  critical acclaim; in his review Roger Ebert stated, “no finer film has ever been made about organized film - not even The Godfather.” Steven Spielberg called it an “epic cinematic masterpiece" that had “intoxicating energy.” In 2000, the U.S. Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in its National Film Registry, deeming it “culturally, historically aesthetically significant.”

The Master Plot: Travis Bickle is an insomniac who works nights as a taxi driver. After he is romantically rejected by a beautiful campaign worker for presidential candidate Charles Palantine, his mental state begins to rapidly deteriorate and he becomes violently obsessed with the idea of getting rid of all the corruption in the city. He is thwarted in his attempt to assassinate Palantine, but when he attacks a brothel and kills the abusive pimp of a 12-year-old sex worker he has tried to befriend, Bickle's vigilante actions are lauded in the press as heroic. He is reunited with the campaign worker, who happens to get into his taxi. Their encounter implies a possible reconciliation, but when he drives off into the night, his ambiguous gaze suggests his violent behavior may not be in the past.

Standout Scene: Scorsese has said he believes the most important scene in the film is the one in an empty hallway where Bickle is on a pay phone unsuccessfully trying to reconcile with Betsy. It is after this conversation that Bickle begins his quest to “clean up” the city even as his mental state deteriorates. The most famous scene, though, is like the one in which Bickle talks to himself in a mirror, fantasizing about a violent confrontation: “You talkin' to me?”

Critical Reception: Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Jodie Foster was nominated for an Academy Award and won the BAFTA for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of Iris; at 14, she was the youngest-ever winner in that category. The film was critically acclaimed, but it was also quite controversial, mainly because of the concern some had about casting a then-12-year-old Foster as the young sex worker, and about the very graphic violence in the climactic shootout. In fact, the violence led audiences at the Cannes Film Festival to boo the film.

The Master Plot: The Departed is both a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and loosely based on a group of Boston gangsters known as the Winter Hill Gang. Colin Sullivan is a mobster who has become a spy inside the Massachusetts State Police, working for the Special Investigation Unit. Meanwhile, police officer Billy Costigan is chosen to go undercover, posing as a criminal, and eventually is recruited by mob boss Frank Costello's organization. When the police and Costello realize there are moles in their respective organizations, Costigan and Sullivan are each assigned to expose the other, even as they try not to have their own secret identities discovered. 

Standout Scene: Costigan calls police captain Queenan to set up a meeting to end his undercover assignment. But Sullivan has arranged for both the police and Costello's men to show up at the meeting. Queenan helps Costigan escape but ends up being killed, and a shootout takes place between the gangsters and police. Before dying from his wounds, Delahunt, one of Costello's men, tells Costigan he knows he's the mole.

Critical Reception: Scorsese won his first, and to date his only, Academy Award for Best Director for The Departed. The film won four other Oscars, including for Best Picture. This crime thriller has made approximately $291 million at the worldwide box office, which is the third most for any Scorsese film. The filmmaker is known for his visual storytelling; in The Departed, one device that stands out is his usage of X-shaped images in the production design to foreshadow people dying. This is an homage to the iconic 1932 crime film Scarface, in which director Howard Hawks used X shapes n his production design to suggest that gangsters were marked men.

The Master Plot: Sports handicapper and mob associate Sam “Ace” Rothstein is sent to Las Vegas to run the Tangiers Casino. He soon has doubled the casino's profits, with this extra, unaccounted-for money delivered to the mafia bosses in Chicago. Mob enforcer Nicky Santoro is sent to Vegas to protect Sam and the illegal cash skim. But Nicky's and his brother's criminal activities soon bring unwanted attention to the casino, as does Sam's talk show, which he films from inside the Tangiers. When the Chicago bosses discover someone on the inside is stealing from the skim, they dispatch Artie Piscano to oversee the operation. But when the FBI bug Piscano's store, they discover enough evidence to launch a full investigation of the casino. Meanwhile, Sam's estranged wife Ginger – a beautiful, tempestuous woman who is addicted to conspicuous consumption – begins an affair with Nicky, but when she tries to get him to kill her husband, he breaks off the relationship and threatens to go to the FBI. In 1982 the FBI closes down the Tangiers Casino and arrests the Chicago mob bosses, who then arrange to murder anyone who might testify against them. Sam survives a car bombing, but Ginger mysteriously dies, while Nicky and his brother Dominick are bludgeoned and then buried alive. Sam, however, is allowed to live. 

Standout Scene: Ace spots a cheater on the casino floor, with violent consequences.

Critical Reception: The film was a commercial success, bringing in more than $116 million at the worldwide box office. It received mixed to positive reviews. In his review for TIME magazine, Richard Schickel wrote, “So long as Casino stays focused on the excesses -- of language, of violence, of ambition -- in the life-styles of the rich and infamous, it remains a smart, knowing, if often repetitive, spectacle.” Sharon Stone's performance was widely singled out for praise - for example, The New York Times stated that she “will be nobody's idea of Hollywood fluff after this spectacular, emblematic performance.” Indeed, Casino's lone Academy Award nomination went to Stone (for Best Actress).

The Master Plot: Jake LaMotta is a middleweight boxer whose career and life are damaged by his violently jealous behavior over his wife Vickie. His mafia-connected brother Joey manages him, and his career falls under the influence of the mob. When Jake viciously assaults a mobster named Salvy over the mistaken belief he's having an affair with Vickie, he's told the local mob boss will only let him compete for the middleweight title if he takes a dive in his next fight. When he does so, Jake gets suspended by the boxing commission, although he is later reinstated and wins the middleweight title in 1949. His success is short-lived; believing his brother is having an affair with Vickie, he assaults Joey in front of the latter's wife and children, leading to the brothers becoming estranged. Jake unsuccessfully attempts to reconcile with Joey after defending his title, and his career soon goes downhill, as he loses his title to Sugar Ray Robinson in 1951. By 1956 he is retired and overweight; Vickie leaves him, and shortly afterward he is imprisoned for introducing underaged girls to men at the nightclub he owns. After being released from prison he reconciles with his brother. By 1964 he has become a struggling stand-up comedian working in seedy clubs.

Standout Scene: Jake's defeat at the hands of Sugar Ray Robinson is one of the most brilliantly shot – and brutal – boxing sequences of all time.

Critical Reception: Scorsese's work on Raging Bull earned him his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director. The film has a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, where the critical consensus states, “Arguably Martin Scorsese's and Robert De Niro's finest film, Raging Bull is often painful to watch, but it's a searing, powerful work about an unsympathetic hero.” The film actually received mixed reviews when it was first released, but, including Scorsese's nod for Best Director, it earned eight Academy Award nominations, winning the awards for Best Actor (Robert DeNiro) and for Best Editing. It is now considered one of the greatest films ever made; in 1990 it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

The Master Plot: Based on Jordan Belfort's memoir, the film follows Belfort from his days as a young stockbroker on Wall Street under hedonistic mentor Mark Hanna, to working at a “boiler room” brokerage firm cold-calling potential investors with questionable sales tactics, to teaming up with Donnie Azoff to start their own firm, Stratton Oakmont. The firm becomes enormously successfully after Belfort trains his employees to use a “hard sell” technique in a scheme in which they sell stocks at an artificially inflated price and then sell them off, causing the price to dive-bomb. Belfort is labeled “The Wolf of Wall Street,” but he becomes a drug addict and his hedonistic lifestyle causes his marriage to fall apart even as the FBI and SEC begin investigating Stratton Oakmont's fraudulent activities.

Standout Scene: Almost paralyzed by quaaludes, Belfort manages to crawl and roll his way to his Lamborghini in an emergency.

Critical Reception: The Wolf of Wall Street  received five Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Picture and Scorsese's ninth nomination for Best Director. Leonardo DiCaprio received an Academy Award nomination and won the Golden Globe award for Best Actor - Musical or Comedy for his performance as Jordan Belfort. With its worldwide box office gross of more than $407 million, The Wolf of Wall Street is currently Scorsese's most commercially successful film. The film received mainly positive reviews from the critics, although some believed that it irresponsibly glorified Belfort and his associates' hedonistic and criminal behavior.