Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
I’ll let others argue over Scorsese’s gender politics. His lack of female characters has long been a point of contention for feminist film-lovers, and when he does include them, it’s often as wives or adornment. Not so in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, his sparkling rom-com starring Ellen Burstyn as a middle-aged woman remaking herself in a man’s world. After her husband dies suddenly, Alice and her wisecracking tween son hit the road, trying to fulfill her childhood dream of becoming a lounge singer. Predictably, she has to dodge hideous men along the way, like leering club owners and a crazed, obsessed younger man (played by a boorish Harvey Keitel). Alice never lets any of this dull her spirit, or suppress her god-tier backtalk. When a creepy barkeep asks her to do a twirl during a job interview, Alice lets out one of my favorite ever lines, one that still holds up 50 years later: “Look at my face. I don’t sing with my ass.” Alaina Demopoulos
Taxi Driver
In an interview with GQ for Killers of the Flower Moon, Scorsese lamented that Travis Bickle, the alienated and violent antihero of his 1976 classic, was no longer the “God’s lonely man” that he and the screenwriter Paul Schrader had imagined at the time. “As we know now,” Scorsese said, “tragically, it’s a norm that every other person is like Travis Bickle.” And yet Taxi Driver retains its terrible power by burrowing deeply into the psychological state of a Vietnam veteran (Robert De Niro) who stalks the city of New York, nourishing the racism and fury that will manifest itself in shocking orgy of violence. That he’s celebrated as hero for murdering a pimp instead of a politician is an irony that continues to haunt a country that likes to imagine “good guys with guns”. In Scorsese’s vision, we come to know more intimately that Travis wants simply to kill. Scott Tobias
The King of Comedy
Martin Scorsese has made so many great films, it’s tough to pick just one. Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Taxi Driver are the masterpieces, The Wolf of Wall Street the most entertaining, Mean Streets the most haunting. But I keep going back to The King of Comedy: it’s still the most unhinged, most unexpected and funniest of Scorsese’s movies. Made shortly after (though conceived well before) the murder of John Lennon on the streets of New York, it’s concerned, most obviously, with the increasingly dangerous relationship between celebrities and their fans; that amazing basement chatshow set has lost none of its freakiness in the interim. Robert De Niro is very funny, with his silly mustache and blow-waved hair, but he’s a little implausible as a stalker; on that score he is outshone by Sandra Bernhard, whose needling neediness still jumps off the screen. But the reason, I think, this film goes so deep is its prescient insight into the increasing derangement that has consumed large swathes of American society, a creeping societal breakdown that if anything is more pronounced today. A film that really hasn’t dated in the slightest. Andrew Pulver
After Hours
Think you “need to get out more”? After Hours is here to disabuse you of that notion. Martin Scorsese’s wonderfully frantic and apocalyptic 1985 feature, about a professional word processor (an increasingly sweat-slicked Griffin Dunne), spans an entire night in pre-Sweetgreen-ed, menace-tinged Soho. Our protagonist is DTW, until it becomes apparent the world is a terrible place and he should just go home and tuck under the covers. He is lured out by the mysterious fellow lonelyheart he meets at a diner (Rosanna Arquette) who spies him reading Henry Miller and invites him to her Soho loft, a massive pad co-inhabited by a tempestuous papier-mache artist who works in a state of undress and specializes in renderings of bagels and cream cheese (Linda Fiorentino). This impromptu studio visit is the springboard for a battery of catastrophes, from an angry mob who mistakes him for a burglar and chases him around the streets to a subway fare hike that precludes his ability to get back to his Upper East Side apartment. Scorsese’s film is a Hitchcock and Wizard of Oz mashup that is also a portal to the Soho of yore, with its rain-slicked streets and cavernous lofts that people with messy lives and no LinkedIn presence could once afford. It’s also a spot-on evocation of any insomniac’s inferno. Lauren Mechling
Goodfellas
If naming Goodfellas as Scorsese’s crowning achievement seems self-evident and herd-minded, like being the zillionth Captain Obvious to declare Sgt Pepper’s the high-water mark of The Beatles, that’s only because its greatness is so unassailable that we can afford to take it for granted. Even without ad infinitum replays on cable, the pleasure center-ravishing mastery of momentum would give every musical cue, freeze-frame and dolly shot an instant-classic sheen. As they coined gangster tropes by the dozen, Scorsese and his co-writer Nicholas Pileggi had plenty on their minds about the 20th-century wise guy as a coarse embodiment of a corrupted American dream, elbowing his way to the front of the line while the suckers work for an honest living. And yet these critiques wouldn’t mean a thing without an immediate surface appeal, the soul-hardening tolls of Henry Hill’s dirty doings all the more meaningful for the narcotic highs that come before his crash. Charles Bramesco
Cape Fear
Often unfairly filed alongside the far more disposable Shutter Island as an example of Scorsese lazily playing to the cheap seats, 1991’s Cape Fear is not a film one will forget quite as easily. Arriving in the middle of the post-Fatal Attraction boom in domestic yuppie thrillers, Scorsese sleekly delivers all of the poppy Saturday night suspense that one would hope and expect but underscores it with a style and gravity mostly missing from a subgenre that quickly veered into parody. While there’s obvious fun in watching Robert De Niro sink his sharpest teeth into the role of the vile, violent rapist Max Cady, it’s surprising that the more explosive fireworks come from the family he’s terrorising. Nick Nolte and Jessica Lange’s on-the-edge marriage needed only a whiff of smoke to truly ignite and the two are uncommonly thrilling to watch in a series of nasty, knows-how-to-make-it-really-hurt arguments (Lange also adds genuine, startling poignance to a hair-raising monologue after what’s usually the most rote part of these films – the killing of a pet). Then there’s the breakout, an uncomfortably effective Juliette Lewis cannily exploring the darkest pockets of teenage sexuality that the dangerous Cady creeps his way into. With a trademark Saul Bass title sequence and Bernard Herrmann’s slithering score recycled from the 1962 original, the spirit of Hitchcock is an obvious uncredited collaborator but Scorsese makes Cape Fear still feel like a true, terrifying original. Benjamin Lee
The Departed
Martin Scorsese is indisputably a wonderful director, one of the best of all time, as many people have argued better than I ever could. But I must admit that my primary motivation for watching much of his filmography is that for a long portion of my life, basically from when I saw Titanic at age 12 until I turned 25 and realized I was not at all old, I was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio. And my favorite DiCaprio-Scorsese collaboration – at least, the one I have seen the most times with the most enjoyment – is The Departed. The remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs from the actor’s true peak era (2006), The Departed is a dense Russian doll of deceit, double-crossing and implausible connections that should not work. But in Scorsese’s hands it has the seamlessness of a magic trick, with added bonuses (the Dropkick Murphys montage, the Boston of it all, Leo making out with Vera Farmiga on a kitchen counter). Scorsese keeps the action tight and the tension even tighter, the director at his most precise. It’s also, crucially, fun to watch, a movie that withstands review much better than my Leo crush. Adrian Horton
The Wolf of Wall Street
Throughout his career Scorsese has shown an obsession with the larger-than-life rise and falls of toxic men, and The Wolf of Wall Street – based on the true story of white collar conman Jordan Belfort – might be his most maximalist and Dickensian story ever. From the helicopter that a grotesquely intoxicated Belfort crash-lands on the golf course of his palatial estate in the film’s opening minutes to the sinking of his massive yacht off the coast of Sardinia to the never-say-die hucksterism that closes the film’s final scene, Wolf is a manic – and I would say knowingly parodic – depiction of masculinity at its most toxic. Made in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the film is arguable superior to the earlier Scorsese epics Goodfellas and Casino because at last we’re finally laughing at them, not with them. Veronica Esposito
Public Speaking
There is a clip of Fran Lebowitz talking about the demise of cultural connoisseurship that I can’t help but watch every time it crosses my timeline. Midway through Scorsese’s 2010 documentary Public Speaking, the critic, cynic and sometime Law & Order judge devastatingly argues that Aids led to a loss of a discerning audience for the arts. “Everything has to be broader,” she concludes. Public Speaking traces Lebowitz’s life in letters and walks alongside her in all weathers, but the heart of the film are her conversations with Scorsese, filmed beneath murals of bohemians and beatniks and animated by his warm laughter. She can be sniffy, barbed – as well as usually right. (I’m not sure how she concluded that all gay bars now have stained glass windows and a valet service, but most of her one-liners still hit.) In a filmography where the city is often a protagonist, Scorsese made a great New York movie by spotlighting one of the most singular characters within it. Owen Myers
Silence
Scorsese’s conflicted, lifelong spiritual pursuits find their fullest and most direct expression in his late-career masterpiece, where The Last Temptation of Christ meets Apocalypse Now. Silence, adapted from Shūsaku Endō’s novel, is a passion play about Jesuit priests in 17th-century Japan who must learn to step down from their pulpit, listen to the community they’re trying to preach to and find truth in humanity rather than scripture. Andrew Garfield’s “padre” Rodrigues follows in the footsteps of so many Scorsese’s protagonists (including Jesus himself). He’s tortured by his faith and searching for the divine in what often appears to be scorched earth. Scorsese, with the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, does God’s work bringing Endō’s text to the screen through some of the most unforgettably poetic images in his career: the plumes of white fog that appear to cloud judgement; Rodrigues seeing Christ, and his own narcissism, in a river’s reflection; and the overhead fisheye shot of priests descending cathedral steps though appearing to be climbing, because the visual hierarchy imposed by religious institutions, a church atop a hill, is flattened when viewed from the heavens. Radheyan Simonpillai
The Irishman
Like so many other movie nerds, it drives me batty to hear hardcore superhero fans, or anyone else, dismiss Martin Scorsese as a purveyor of gangster pictures, just because that’s one subgenre in which he happens to have made some defining classics. At the same time, I’m willing to temporarily put aside the litany of counters to this narrative (an Edith Wharton adaptation, a children’s movie, several religious epics, musical documentaries and so on) to claim The Irishman, his most recent movie to focus largely on career criminals, as a favorite. Best watched in one long, immersive sitting, the movie takes us through gangster-movie standbys that Scorsese helped to modernize – darkly funny personality conflicts, gruesome betrayals, expert scenery-chewing – with a growing sense of unease and inevitability. Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) is on a steady march to the grave, just like all of us, and doesn’t realize until it’s too late (or maybe at all) how important it is to grasp on tight to a piece of your soul during the trip. Just like life, Scorsese’s film is long, and also over far too soon. Jesse Hassenger
