Martin Scorsese got his start alongside Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola as one of the pioneers of the New Hollywood movement in the 1970s. Acclaimed movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver made Scorsese a household name. Unlike many of his New Hollywood peers, Scorsese has remained just as prolific and revered in the decades since the movement’s heyday.
In the past decade alone, Scorsese helmed two of his most renowned movies: The Wolf of Wall Street and The Irishman. The 2010s also saw the director step outside of his comfort zone with the family-friendly Hugo and the psychological thriller Shutter Island.
Silence (2016) – 7.1
The cinematic subject matter that Scorsese is most closely associated with is the mafia, but a very close second would be Catholicism. In addition to using Catholic guilt as a theme in many of his gangster movies, Scorsese has directed a handful of overtly religious movies. Mean Streets’ depiction of a mobster who repents in church is pretty Catholic-centric, but not as much as a whole movie about a fictionalized Jesus Christ.
After helming biopics of both Jesus and the 14th Dalai Lama, Scorsese told the story of two Jesuit priests who face hostility and anti-Catholic prejudice as they search for their mentor in 17th-century Japan in the underrated gem Silence. Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield anchor the movie with a pair of typically fantastic performances.
Hugo (2011) – 7.5
Scorsese’s films are notorious for their graphic violence, excessive profanity, and pitch-black humor, so he might not seem like a good fit for a family film. But his first attempt at a family-friendly movie, 2011’s Hugo, proves that Scorsese would be just as brilliant if he’d chosen to make movies for kids (although he might not have been as financially successful, since Hugo bombed at the box office).
Hugo initially tells the story of a young orphan who lives in a Parisian train station, but it becomes a film history lesson when Ben Kingsley’s character turns out to be groundbreaking filmmaker Georges Méliès. It suddenly ceases to be a whimsical historical adventure and becomes a big-budget making-of documentary for A Trip to the Moon.
The Irishman (2019) – 7.8
Starting with Mean Streets, Robert De Niro became Scorsese’s go-to lead actor. Throughout the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, the actor-director pairing collaborated on a bunch of different movies, from vigilante thriller Taxi Driver to boxing biopic Raging Bull to darkly comic caper The King of Comedy. In 2019, Scorsese finally reunited with De Niro after a couple of decades apart for The Irishman. Based on the memoirs of mob hitman Frank Sheeran, The Irishman dramatizes Sheeran’s highly disputed claim that he was responsible for the unsolved murder of union boss Jimmy Hoffa.
Hoffa was played spectacularly by Al Pacino, who reunited with his Heat/Righteous Kill co-star and worked with Scorsese for the first time in The Irishman. Some of the computer-generated de-aging effects are a little shaky, but The Irishman marked a welcome return to the gangster genre for Scorsese. With its cerebral tone and cautionary tale, The Irishman has been dubbed a more mature version of Goodfellas.
Shutter Island (2010) – 8.2
In between his usual crime epics, Scorsese tends to dabble in other genres. In 2010, he teamed up with Leonardo DiCaprio – the go-to leading man who replaced Robert De Niro in the 21st century – for a harrowing psychological thriller. Shutter Island marked Scorsese’s first foray into the horror genre since his fan-favorite remake of Cape Fear – and its unsettling imagery and demoralizing twist managed to live up to expectations. Like Cape Fear, Shutter Island is revered among horror fans for its creepy visuals and bleak storytelling.
Adapted from the Dennis Lehane novel of the same name, Shutter Island stars DiCaprio as a U.S. Marshal who travels to a mental institution on a remote island to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a patient. During the investigation, he begins to question his own grip on reality and uncovers a horrifying truth. This movie benefits from countless rewatches, because Scorsese fills the first two acts with a bunch of foreshadowing ahead of the shocking third-act twist.
The Wolf Of Wall Street (2013) – 8.2
Aptly described by critics as “Goodfellas meets The Hangover,” The Wolf of Wall Street is easily the most entertaining movie ever made about stock trades. The movie is just as visually striking and ethically thought-provoking as Scorsese’s other films, but it’s also a raunchy, riotous hard-R comedy full of sex and drugs. It’s hardly surprising that it’s Scorsese’s highest-grossing film by a margin of about $100 million. The movie’s runtime clocks in at around three hours, but it moves at such a rapid pace – and has so many laughs from beginning to end – that it doesn’t feel anywhere near that long.
Jordan Belfort, played hysterically by Leonardo DiCaprio, is a classic Scorsese antihero. Like Henry Hill and Jake LaMotta, Belfort is an unsympathetic abuser whose greed causes his own downfall. The movie divided critics, with some praising its satire of Belfort’s criminal lifestyle and others claiming it glorifies it, but IMDb users are unanimous in their acclaim.