Best Martin Scorsese Films, Ranked by IQ Score

Martin Scorsese's filmography is the most sustained engagement with American moral architecture in the medium's history. From Mean Streets (1973) through Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), the catalog returns repeatedly to the same questions: what does Catholic guilt do to economic ambition? What does America owe to the people it disposes of in its consolidation? When does style become structural argument rather than decoration?

The TVI rubric reads the catalog as remarkably consistent. Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, and The Departed are the canonical Masterclass entries. The Age of Innocence and Silence are the outside-the-gangster-register works that mark Scorsese as a more philosophical director than the popular-culture residue admits. The King of Comedy is the most-underrated entry — a parasocial-fame screenplay that became more legible as social media reshaped the cultural conditions the film anticipated.