Martin Scorsese · Filmography Ranked
Best Martin Scorsese Films, Ranked by IQ Score
Half a century of one of American cinema's most structurally rigorous directors. Every Scorsese film, 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, Silence, and Kundun 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. The documentary work, The Last Waltz and No Direction Home, is rarely discussed alongside his narrative features but is some of the most-rigorous music documentary in the medium.
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Questions about this ranking
What is the best Martin Scorsese film?
By IQ Score on TV Intelligentsia, the highest-rated Scorsese films are Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and Raging Bull (all Masterclass tier). Silence, The Age of Innocence, and The King of Comedy are the outside-the-gangster-register entries that round out his Masterclass-tier work.
How does TVI rank Scorsese's filmography?
Every Scorsese film is scored on the same TVI rubric: Cognitive Stimulation (40%), Educational Value (35%), Craft & Quality (25%). The IQ Score reflects how structurally rigorous each film is, the rubric reads Scorsese's catalog as remarkably consistent across five decades.
Why is The King of Comedy ranked so high?
TV Intelligentsia scores The King of Comedy at Masterclass tier (164/200). The screenplay's parasocial-fame premise, written in 1982, anticipated the cultural conditions social media would produce decades later. Rupert Pupkin became more legible as a character as fame economics shifted in the direction the film predicted.
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