Every Martin Scorsese Movie Ranked Worst To Best

By Aidan Whatman / November 9, 2023

Martin Scorsese has done it all. Since his debut feature released back in 1967, the trailblazing filmmaker has made gangster pictures and period romances, historical epics and breakneck thrillers, family-friendly adventure flicks, and even a musical for good measure.

In all that time, Scorsese has never phoned it in, and even at his worst his films are so wildly passionate and personal that it's impossible not to be awed by his skill, or his deep, often heartbreaking assessments of religious turmoil, obsession, lawlessness, prejudice, faith and grief.

With the release of his latest masterwork, Killers of the Flowers Moon, Scorsese has once again outdone himself, proving for the umpteenth time that he's earned his place as one cinema's greatest visionaries. But which of his many hits is the best of them all?

From his era-defining run through the 1970s and '80s, where he established himself as a leading figure in the New Hollywood movement, to his recent string of late-career morality plays, here are all 26 of Martin Scorsese's feature films ranked from worst to best.

27. Boxcar Bertha (1972)

Scorsese's second movie is a Roger Corman production about a troubled orphan (Barbara Hershey) who's lured into a life of crime during the Great Depression, and it's every bit as trashy, violent and bluntly executed as its write-up makes it sound.

Directed on a shoestring budget and aiming only for cheap thrills, Boxcar Bertha makes for a cynical and cold-blooded affair, a drama that Scorsese tries to inject with more depth of feeling than Corman's appetites will allow.

You can sense Scorsese trying to make something else of the melodrama, like an artist caged and held back from his potential, but there's only so much he can do. Boxcar Bertha isn't terrible, but it is the work of a director begging for better material, ready to break free and find his own voice. From here, mountains would be made.