Beyond Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, One of Our Own or Casino, there is a Scorsese overshadowed by his great titles. With dramas, comedies and documentaries that tell us about the director as a total filmmaker.
Genre: Drama
Starring: Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro
Year: 1973
The film that put him on the map of 70s cinema. Following the advice given to him by John Cassavetes, he talks about very personal matters. It tells the story of a timid young man (Harvey Keitel), a copy of Scorsese himself, in contact with the mafia in Little Italy, his neighborhood in New York, along with his reckless friend (Robert de Niro). With influences from gangster movies and Sam Fuller in particular.
Where to see it: Prime and Filmin
Genre: Road Movie
Starring: Ellen Burstyn and Kris Kristofferson
Year: 1974
A radical turn with respect to the masculine and autobiographical world that, until then, had dominated his cinema. Foreign script, commissioned film. Scorsese adds something more vital to Hollywood’s everlasting papier-mâché optimism. Even more true.
Where to see it: Filmin
Genre: Black comedy
Starring: Griffin Dunne and Rosanna Arquette
Year: 1985
The return to independent cinema after a series of box office failures. A kind of Ulysses trip, through the streets of a nocturnal New York, in a comical way by a very 80s yuppie. Parody of Hitchcock’s style.
Where to see it: Filmin
Genre: Drama
Starring: Nick Nolte and Rosanna Arquette
Year: 1989
Film of three episodes, in which Scorsese shares ownership with Woody Allen and Coppola. His segment is titled Apuntes al natural and speaks, in a dramatic way, of artistic creation and its servitudes. Of the selfishness that creation entails. Stark and intense.
Where to see it: rental on M and Prime
Genre: Romance
Starring: Daniel Day Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer
Year: 1993
Romantic drama with an overwhelming degree of detail. Recreation of an opulent world where loneliness and impossible relationships are not absent. Nor is there any lack of curiosity about class relations, so much to Scorsese’s taste. A fascinating film that arises from the director’s infatuation with Edith Wharton’s novel.
Where to watch it: Netflix
Genre: Documentary series
Year: 1995
Where he explains what the cinema of his own country means to him. He talks about the films that have influenced him and what it means to him to be a film director. Essential.
Where to see it: Filmin
Genre: Concert
Year 2008
The Stones have been a cinematic genre since Godard followed them with his camera during the recording of Sympathy for the Devil. Scorsese is the director who has used the most songs by the band in his films.
Where to see it: Prime and Filmin
Genre: Drama
Starring: Nicolas Cage and Patricia Arquette
Year: 1999
Hallucinated approach to the energy of Taxi driver and its unbreathable, more unhealthy atmosphere. Visually unexpected, narratively disturbing. Character film with Nicole Cage, as a paramedic, closer to Leaving Las Vegas than to later blunders.
Where to see it: Rental on M, Rakuten and Prime
Genre: Thriller
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo
Year 2003
Dennis Lehane’s novel already dissolved, like the film, the boundaries between reality and fiction. Scorsese takes artifice – and the play of mirrors – to the extreme. He tells us about the thin line that separates madness from reason.
Where to see it: M, Filmin and Prime