While shooting The Godfather Part II, the movie that would eventually earn him his first Oscar victory, Robert De Niro discovered middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta‘s autobiography and became fascinated by the character. He wanted to get it made into a film, so he approached his dear friend Martin Scorsese, the man who many cinephiles today would call the greatest living filmmaker. Initially, however, Scorsese turned down De Niro, since he failed to see the appeal of the story and found boxing itself awfully boring. After nearly dying from a drug overdose and being again persuaded by De Niro, however, the director finally agreed to direct Raging Bull. He finally understood boxing: The ring was the perfect metaphor for life itself. In the years since, Scorsese has referred to this tale of self-destruction and atonement as the movie that saved not only his career, but his life.
The movie had a lukewarm commercial performance, but it was a smash hit with critics. It received eight Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Director, and it led De Niro to his second Oscar win. Today, people remember the film as not just a classic, but the single greatest sports movie ever made—by a pretty decent margin. It’s frequent to find cinephiles praising its every element: De Niro’s powerhouse performance, one of the greatest in the history of cinema, Scorsese’s visceral, expressionistic direction and stunning black-and-white visuals, and the operatic, emotionally searing way in which screenwriters Paul Schrader and Mardik Martin approach the story, delivering a character study that packs a hell of a punch (pun only somewhat intended). Raging Bull is, indeed, one of the most flawless films ever made, and definitely one of Scorsese’s masterpieces, but it’s not the director’s magnum opus. There are actually three precious gems—one terribly underrated, one an essential neo-noir classic, one widely regarded as Scorsese’s greatest work—that could reasonably be said to be superior to Raging Bull. These three films, too, are among the best of all time, and further proof (as if any more were needed) that cinema has never seen a talent quite like Martin Scorsese.
‘Silence’ (2016)
Many veteran directors from the New Hollywood movement have lost a bit of their spark over the course of the last couple of decades, or at least struggled to deliver masterpieces of the quality of what they once had to offer. Not Scorsese. Throughout the entirety of the 21st century, the director has continued to deliver just as many timeless gems as he did at the peak of his career, many of them worthy of being considered among his best films ever. None of these 21st-century masterpieces, however, is better than what may just be Scorsese’s most underrated movie: Silence. Though it was a critical success and received an Oscar nomination for Best Cinematography, it performed poorly at the box office and doesn’t typically get as much love from fans as it deserves. It’s one of the best epic movies of the last 10 years, a period piece based on an equally masterful 1966 novel of the same title by Shūsaku Endō. Religious themes and characters struggling with God’s silence have been a common trope throughout the entirety of Scorsese’s filmography, but rarely has he ever explored them with quite this level of depth and complexity.
Silence had been a long-time passion project for Scorsese, one that he had been trying to develop for over two decades. Once it finally came about, it felt like the perfect time. For one, Andrew Garfield, Liam Neeson, and Adam Driver are all flawlessly cast in their emotionally stirring roles, and it’s difficult to imagine anyone else playing those parts. Add to that Rodrigo Prieto‘s jaw-dropping Oscar-nominated cinematography, the patience and contemplative tone of Thelma Schoonmaker‘s editing, and the uncompromising beauty and spiritual heaviness of Scorsese’s direction, and you get a film that feels like it was made precisely when it needed to be made. The nearly three-hour runtime is certainly nothing to scoff at, and those unfamiliar with (or unfavorable toward) Scorsese’s slower-burning projects will probably struggle a bit with it. But there’s a thematic complexity, somber sense of passion, and unsettling but thought-provoking tone here which those fond of slow cinema will inevitably find absolutely fascinating. The scale is gargantuan, and the way the film forces its audience to confront the things that they personally believe and have faith in is challenging, but ultimately every bit as rewarding as any Scorsese fan could have hoped.
‘Taxi Driver’ (1976)
He made four films (of varying levels of quality) before it, but it was Taxi Driver that turned Martin Scorsese into a household name among the world’s cinephiles and established him as a defining voice of the New Hollywood movement. It’s one of those ’70s movies that have aged like fine wine, a brilliant character study that was admirably made on a tiny budget. The winner of the 1976 Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or, the movie was also nominated for four Academy Awards, and even that level of praise wasn’t enough. It was Scorsese’s first collaboration with Paul Schrader and second collaboration with De Niro, the latter of whom delivers what some may call his greatest performance ever. On top of its brilliant screenplay and exceptional cast, Taxi Driver serves as a provocative and thoughtful portrait of the national trauma and psychosis of the Vietnam War that was so often explored by Hollywood at the time.
Never before had New York City been depicted in such a moody, atmospheric light of urban decay and moral grayness, and never before has it been depicted this exceptionally again. Scorsese masterfully places his audience in the shoes of a twisted yet psychologically fascinating protagonist without ever alienating him, always making sure that there’s enough humanity visible in De Niro’s Travis Bickle to make him impossible to take one’s eyes off of. A disturbing, controversial, and profound cautionary tale on the dangers of pushing people to the fringes of society, Taxi Driver is a movie whose message on the dark side of alienated masculinity rings perhaps even truer today. It’s a chilling, absolutely timeless drama, as well as a masterclass in how to balance character work, tone and atmosphere, and thematic exploration in such a way that none of those elements ever feel sidelined or neglected.
‘Goodfellas’ (1990)
There are those who would call Goodfellas Martin Scorsese’s greatest film. There are those, even, who would call it the best gangster movie of all time. It’s a film so exceptional and absolutely faultless that it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, period. It’s a biopic based on Nicholas Pileggi‘s (who co-wrote the screenplay with Scorsese) Wiseguy, about the rise and fall of Mafia associate Henry Hill. Goodfellas is the high point of Scorsese’s career and filmography in virtually every way, anchored by one of the greatest trifectas of performances in movie history: Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro. It was nominated for six Academy Awards in 1991, and most cinephiles would agree that it was considerably more deserving of winning Best Picture than Kevin Costner‘s Dances With Wolves. Whatever the case, it’s the court of public opinion that matters most in the end, and Goodfellas has aged beautifully as one of the best movies of the ’90s—if not the very best.
Roger Ebert, perhaps the most famous movie critic in history, named Martin Scorsese as his favorite filmmaker of all time. In his review of Goodfellas, he said that “no finer film has ever been made about organized crime – not even The Godfather.” That’s virtually the highest compliment that a crime film can receive, and it was well-deserved praise. The perfect performances, the stunning camerawork, the structurally taut plotting, the endlessly quotable dialogue, the breathtaking third act — it all makes for one of the most impressive artistic achievements in the history of Hollywood. Calling Goodfellas Martin Scorsese’s greatest movie feels less like an opinion and more like a statement of fact, and that’s because few American films have ever been this iconic and tremendously influential. Scorsese directs it with stylish, emotionally stirring mastery of his craft, delivering a biopic epic that doesn’t let up for a single second of its two-and-a-half-hour runtime.