The Best Martin Scorsese Movies

Was this email forwarded to you? Awesome! Glad you’re here – now come back next week by subscribing for free.

Saw The Odyssey yesterday. Alone at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. I waited five days from its release date. And the theater was packed. To be fair, it was 95% retirees (can’t wait until that’s my wife and me one day), but still. This movie obviously had some hype around it.

And, yes, I know that everyone and their dog have released their Christopher Nolan movie rankings already. And sure, I’ll drop mine at the end just because. But all this Nolan talk has actually gotten me thinking more about my favorite director and trying to place his best work.

I’m talking, of course, about Martin Scorsese.

But before we get to that, I do want to first discuss the The Odyssey. Because what Nolan gets out of The Odyssey is the same reason I love Scorsese. It takes characters who are damaged or downright broken and pins them against internal conflict while also having to deal with extreme external battles.

I was blown away with how much I liked this film. I had heard some negative reviews from friends and colleagues. I had read some over-inflated reviews about this being one of Nolan’s best adaptations yet.

The cinematography was spectacular, Matt Damon did some of his best acting since the early Jason Bourne days, and Nolan was able to draw out the thematic elements with precision while not being too on-the-nose about them.

But Nolan is still no Scorsese. So, with that, let’s get to the Best Martin Scorsese Movies.

From the non-stop camera movement to the Quaalude crawl, this is pure, uncut Scorsese. What he is able to get out of DiCaprio and Jonah Hill makes this one of the greatest comedies(?) of the century. It’s bottled up chaos, and nearly every scene makes you set down the phone and lean in.

Shutter Island is by far the most underrated Scorsese film. People hate on the ending, but the ending is what puts this in my Top 5. Scorsese makes me want to hit pause, take a breath, then rewind and start the whole dang movie over just to watch it from a different lens. The unreliable narrator is nothing new to filmmaking, but how Scorsese bakes it into every scene and weaves the dialog around it… it’s what makes this one of his greatest films.

I’m not old enough to be around when this film came out. But I am a sucker for a great sports movie. Maybe it’s the black and white. Maybe its the unlikable characters you can’t turn away from. Or maybe it’s because he went beyond a typical sports-movie narrative and turned it into actual art.

There are moments this movie makes me laugh. There are moments I wince. And there are moments where I’m actually taken out of the narrative simply because the shot is so well orchestrated. Scorsese has a knack for taking criminals, deviants, degenerates and just plain “bad guys” and making you try to understand them and the decisions they make. Scorsese gets the most out of every actor here, though maybe not to the degree of the No. 1 film on our list.

The character development in this film is Scorsese’s best work. There is internal conflict, external conflict, and the tension builds perfectly towards the “when will their paths cross?” finale. DiCaprio and Damon playing mirrored liars on opposite sides of the same lie is one of the great dual-performance setups in modern film, and Nicholson is peak Nicholson. Scorsese won the Oscar, and I think The Departed is the best version of what Scorsese does best – deliver something truly thought-provoking while still maxing out the entertainment factor.

Taxi Driver is just too dark to make my Top 5. I watched it for the first time a few years back and simply don’t want to revisit it. Meanwhile, Casino might be the Scorsese film I’ve watched most, yet I couldn’t find a place for it. Every time I am set to visit Las Vegas, I have to do a Casino rewatch, and work has brought me to Vegas often in the past.

5. The Prestige
4. The Odyssey
3. Oppenheimer
2. Inception
1. The Dark Knight

Really hard to leave Dunkirk and Interstellar off this list, but I think this is the right order. Yes, the Odyssey belongs in this group. No, I don’t want to sort through all the hate mail I’ll get on this, but I’ll do it anyway.

Where does The Odyssey fall in your Nolan rankings? Better yet, what are the Top 5 movies from YOUR favorite director? (Please don’t say it’s Tarantino).

See ya next week.