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The full ranking

Best Movies Directed by Martin Scorsese

Mean streets, wise guys, and faith under pressure. Six decades of Martin Scorsese narrative features, ranked by critics and audiences.

  1. 1

    Goodfellas (1990)

    As far back as anybody can remember, this has been the gangster movie all others are measured against. The Copacabana tracking shot, the "funny how?" scene, and three decades of imitators.

  2. 2

    Raging Bull (1980)

    Jake LaMotta destroys everything he loves in luminous black and white, with De Niro's physical transformation the stuff of legend. Routinely named the best American film of the 1980s.

  3. 3

    The Departed (2006)

    A cop inside the mob and a mobster inside the police, with Boston as the chessboard. The double-mole thriller finally won Scorsese his Best Director Oscar.

  4. 4

    Taxi Driver (1976)

    Travis Bickle drifts through a feverish 1970s New York toward an explosion you can see coming and cannot stop. "You talkin' to me?" became shorthand for American loneliness.

  5. 5

    Casino (1995)

    Las Vegas as paradise lost: De Niro runs the Tangiers, Pesci burns it down, and Sharon Stone gives the performance of her career. The glittering, brutal desert sibling of Goodfellas.

  6. 6

    The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

    Three hours of Jordan Belfort's pump-and-dump bacchanal, played at full roar by Leonardo DiCaprio. The fastest, funniest, and most quoted film of Scorsese's late period.

  7. 7

    The Irishman (2019)

    Frank Sheeran paints houses across half a century of union halls and mob hits, until only silence is left. Scorsese's elegiac reunion with De Niro, Pesci, and Pacino.

  8. 8

    The King of Comedy (1982)

    Rupert Pupkin kidnaps his way to eleven minutes of fame, and the laughter keeps catching in your throat. Decades ahead of its time on celebrity worship and parasocial obsession.

  9. 9

    The Age of Innocence (1993)

    Scorsese trades knives for opera gloves in Edith Wharton's Gilded Age New York, where a single glance can ruin a life. He has called it his most violent film.

  10. 10

    Mean Streets (1973)

    Charlie, Johnny Boy, and the bar-lit purgatory of Little Italy, where penance is paid in the streets. The 1973 breakthrough that announced Scorsese and De Niro to the world.

Ranked across 7 sources: Rolling Stone · Every Scorsese Movie Ranked 2023; TechRadar · Every Scorsese Movie Ranked 2024; The Hollywood Reporter · Scorsese Top 10 2023; /Film · Every Scorsese Feature Ranked 2021; IMDb · Ranked by User Rating (June 2026); Letterboxd · Ranked by Member Rating (June 2026); Rotten Tomatoes · Ranked by Critic Rating (June 2026). Full scoring is on the Methodology tab above.

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