Best Martin Scorsese Movies

Martin Scorsese has been making films for over five decades, and the consistency of his output across that span borders on absurd. From a 1976 character study about a disturbed cab driver to a 2023 historical crime epic about the Osage murders, he has revisited themes of violence, loyalty, self-destruction, and American corruption without ever telling the same story twice. These eight films represent the core of his filmography as covered in our BuzzVerdicts, with ratings ranging from 4.2 to 4.8 stars. Every one of them is worth your time, though they demand very different things from the audience.

What holds this body of work together isn’t genre or formula. It’s a willingness to sit inside the perspective of people most films would keep at a safe distance. Scorsese doesn’t explain his characters to you. He puts you close enough to understand them and then trusts you to figure out how you feel about that experience. Some of these films are thrilling, some are exhausting, and some are devastating. A few manage all three in the same sitting.

Where Scorsese Reached His Highest Peak

Goodfellas sits at the top of our ratings at 4.8 stars, and community consensus supports that number about as strongly as any film gets supported. Released in 1990, it follows mob associate Henry Hill’s rise and collapse across three decades of organized crime in New York. Ray Liotta holds the center as Henry, while Joe Pesci’s volatile Tommy DeVito and Robert De Niro’s quietly menacing Jimmy Conway orbit around him in performances that have become part of the cultural vocabulary. Kinetic editing, popular music deployed as narrative commentary, and the famous Copacabana tracking shot all became templates that filmmakers have been borrowing from ever since.

What makes Goodfellas endure beyond its technical brilliance is a deliberate seduction. It pulls you into Henry’s world, makes you laugh at his stories and enjoy his company, and then lets you sit with the realization that you were having a good time watching terrible things happen. Henry’s final scene, where he mourns the loss of excitement rather than expressing any remorse, works as both a character beat and a mirror pointed directly at the audience.

Close behind at 4.7 stars, Taxi Driver is a completely different animal. Where Goodfellas is fast, funny, and social, Taxi Driver is slow, internal, and deeply isolating. Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam veteran driving a cab through New York City at night, gradually spiraling from loneliness into a violent mission he barely understands himself. Paul Schrader’s screenplay and Bernard Herrmann’s final score create a mood that has proven impossible to shake for nearly fifty years.

Travis Bickle became one of the most iconic figures in American cinema not because audiences identified with him but because the film made them understand him just well enough to feel uncomfortable about it. Scorsese’s direction locks the viewer into Travis’s perspective with disorienting precision, and the ending remains one of the most debated sequences in film history. Whether it should be taken at face value or read as something darker is a question that shows no sign of settling. That ambiguity keeps pulling people back.

Portraits of Men Who Destroyed Everything They Touched

Raging Bull earns 4.5 stars as one of the most uncompromising character studies Scorsese has ever produced. Robert De Niro’s transformation into middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta, including gaining over 60 pounds for the later scenes, remains one of the most committed physical performances in film history. But the physical change is only the surface. De Niro plays LaMotta as a man who experiences every emotion as a form of violence, whose jealousy and rage poison every relationship until he’s left alone rehearsing someone else’s words in a dressing room mirror.

Shot in black and white, the film strips away any glamour from LaMotta’s world and forces the audience to confront his self-destruction without the comfort of a redemption arc. Joe Pesci’s Joey LaMotta serves as the emotional spine of the story, and when Jake drives his brother away through an accusation too vile to walk back, the damage registers as something permanent. Raging Bull is not a boxing movie. It’s a film about a man who had no language for self-expression beyond violence, and it asks nothing of the audience except that they watch.

Casino covers similar thematic ground at a vastly different scale, earning 4.2 stars. Where Raging Bull is intimate and claustrophobic, Casino is enormous and procedural. Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi document how organized crime ran Las Vegas in its golden age, following De Niro’s Ace Rothstein as he manages a casino with obsessive precision while Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro and Sharon Stone’s Ginger McKenna pull the operation apart from the inside.

Stone’s performance as Ginger is the film’s revelation. Her arc from glamorous hustler to a woman spiraling through addiction and desperation gives Casino an emotional core that its procedural surface might otherwise lack. At 178 minutes, it lives permanently in the shadow of Goodfellas, and the runtime demands genuine commitment. But what Scorsese builds here is something his earlier mob film never attempted: a comprehensive look at how organized crime operated as a business and why that business was always destined to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

A New Partnership and a Different Kind of Energy

Earning 4.5 stars, The Departed brought Scorsese a new leading man and a renewed creative intensity. An Irish mob boss in South Boston plants his protege inside the Massachusetts State Police while the police send their own man undercover into the mob. Leonardo DiCaprio delivers one of his most intense performances as the undercover cop unraveling under pressure, and Matt Damon plays the opposite side with smooth confidence that curdles into desperation as the walls close in.

Mark Wahlberg nearly steals the entire film in a supporting role, and the dialogue crackles with a combination of tension, humor, and menace that makes it one of the funniest crime films ever produced. A forced romantic subplot and some of Jack Nicholson’s broader choices as the mob boss keep it a half-step below Scorsese’s absolute peak. But only a half-step. The cat-and-mouse tension never lets up across two and a half hours, and the film rewards every rewatch with dynamics and details that register differently each time through.

With The Wolf of Wall Street, Scorsese pushed his DiCaprio partnership into entirely different territory, earning 4.3 stars for a three-hour chronicle of fraudulent stockbroker Jordan Belfort’s rise and downfall. DiCaprio gives what many consider his finest performance, committing to the role with manic physical energy that sustains the enormous runtime on pure force of will. Jonah Hill matches him beat for beat as Donnie Azoff, and their dynamic provides some of the film’s strongest moments.

It operates as a deliberate provocation. Scorsese makes the corruption look fun, the parties look irresistible, and the lifestyle look worth every consequence, then ends on a long, implicating stare at an audience of eager aspiring salespeople who have learned nothing. Whether that approach constitutes satire or glorification is a question that has been argued for over a decade, and the film seems perfectly content to let that argument continue without resolution. The discomfort you feel afterward is the actual content of the movie.

Two Late-Career Epics About What Violence Actually Costs

At 209 minutes, The Irishman is Scorsese’s longest film, and it earns its 4.3 stars almost entirely through the devastating power of its final hour. De Niro plays Frank Sheeran, a labor union official and mob hitman, as a man defined by compliance. He follows orders, does terrible things without apparent internal conflict, and moves through decades of violence with a blank competence that is chilling precisely because it’s so unremarkable. Al Pacino’s Jimmy Hoffa brings theatrical charisma to the film’s middle sections, while Pesci returns with a performance that is the complete opposite of everything he was known for, playing mob boss Russell Bufalino as soft-spoken, grandfatherly, and absolutely lethal.

Where Goodfellas and Casino depicted the thrill and mechanics of organized crime, this film depicts what those lives actually buy you in the end: nothing. Frank Sheeran finishes alone in a nursing home, trying to explain his life to people who don’t recognize the names he’s dropping. De-aging technology that allows the actors to play younger versions of themselves distracts at times, particularly when their movements don’t match their digitally smoothed faces. But the final stretch is among the most devastating work Scorsese has ever produced, a portrait of old age and regret that reframes every mob movie he ever made, including his own.

Killers of the Flower Moon earns the same 4.3 stars and represents Scorsese working on a completely different canvas. Based on the true story of the systematic murder of Osage Nation members in 1920s Oklahoma for their oil wealth, the film focuses on the marriage between Ernest Burkhart (DiCaprio) and his Osage wife Mollie (Lily Gladstone). DiCaprio plays Ernest as a weak, malleable man whose greed makes him complicit in monstrous things, while De Niro’s William Hale presents himself as a friend to the Osage community while orchestrating the murders of their family members.

Lily Gladstone’s performance anchors everything. She plays Mollie with remarkable economy, communicating intelligence, dignity, and dawning horror through stillness and shifts in body language as the truth becomes impossible to deny. At 206 minutes, the pacing is deliberate even by Scorsese’s standards. But the film grapples with how an entire community can participate in evil while maintaining a surface of normality, connecting directly to Scorsese’s lifelong preoccupation with organized crime and institutional corruption while bringing that preoccupation to territory he had never explored before.

Five Decades of Asking the Same Question

Eight films spanning 47 years, and in every one of them Scorsese is asking the same question from a different angle: what happens when people trade their humanity for something they think they want? Henry Hill traded his for excitement. Travis Bickle traded his for a sense of purpose. Jake LaMotta couldn’t trade his because he never figured out how to access it in the first place. Jordan Belfort traded his for money and never noticed it was gone. Frank Sheeran traded his for belonging and didn’t realize the cost until everyone he belonged to was dead.

From 4.2 to 4.8 stars, no two of these films feel like the same movie despite sharing a director, frequent collaborators, and overlapping themes. Scorsese has spent his career finding new ways to tell stories about people who made terrible choices, and he has never once made the mistake of telling the audience how to feel about them. Whether that trust in the viewer makes him a moralist or something harder to categorize is a question each of these eight films answers differently.