About a year ago, I started a project to watch every feature film Martin Scorsese has ever directed, in chronological order.
Just over 59 hours (!) of Scorsese cinema later, I’ve reached the end of the list. It’s just in time for the October release of Scorsese’s latest, Killers of the Flower Moon, which will add another 3.5 (!!) hours to the Hours of My Life I Have Lost to Watching Scorsese Movies That I Will Never, Ever Get Back counter.
I’m not the only person who has watched all of Scorsese’s films and put them in ranked order on the internet. But when I read some of the top rankings, I didn’t see my opinions reflected in many of them. So, I wrote my own list. (This is it!).
This is a list for people who are newer to Scorsese’s filmography and want to learn more about it. It’s not a movie list for girls or a feminist take on Scorsese, but just my actual opinions, as a human female movie-watching person. And some of my opinions don’t match the mainstream — but 69% of film critics are men, so maybe this has less to do with the quality of my analysis, and more to do with how we define who gets to have a “mainstream” popular opinion.
Before we get to the movies, here’s some reflections on what I learned.
Lesson #1: Watching full director filmographies in order is fun
This project was inspired by a podcast called Cinemythology that started an movie-by-movie series on Scorsese. My partner and I decided it would be fun to follow along with their approach, and kept going even when they slowed their project.