Make the Case: 5 Martin Scorsese Movie Recommendations Ranked

Rather than obsessively discuss legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s desire to see more than just comic book movies in the mainstream, let’s focus on what he’s done for the medium beyond his actual creative output. This month at Make the Case, I’ll be looking at some of the movies he does seem to enjoy, and seeing how they play for me. It’s just more interesting to me to look at what he contributes to art outside of his movies, as oppoosed to the same conversation about what he doesn’t.

The World Cinema Project, dedicated to the preservation of world cinema, is just one example of someone who uses their influence and passion to ensure we have a range of movies to study and enjoy. That’s the value of someone like Martin Scorsese, and he’s not the only one who believes that a thriving ecosystem for cinema draws from every possible corner. There’s a place at the table for anything and everything, from superhero epics to inscrutable surrealist experiences, if you’re willing to have an open mind. Scorsese does — better than most anyway. Although that doesn’t mean he’s infallible in his opinions.

One thing becomes apparent as you go through the many different sorts of movies Scorsese has recommended over his long life and career. Beyond the fact that he likes a lot of very different movies. The value of embracing a broad cinematic range can be measured in various ways, including within the films Scorsese has directed and produced (and sometimes co-written) himself. His suggestions and picks over the years gives us a ton of films to explore, regardless of where your interests lie.

Having just seen and reviewed his newest, Killers of the Flower Moon, I’m in the mood to see some of the movies still powering a guy who’s still directing stuff as strong as Killers of the Flower Moon in his 80s. I’ve randomly picked five movies from the long list of films Martin Scorsese has raved about or recommended over the years, ranking them from “worst” to best. As it turns out, I like a good range of the movies he seems to be the most keyed up about, but there’s definitely more than a few that I’m not a big fan of. Fellini would be one example, but that’s a rambling conversation for another time.

 

5. Mother! (2017)

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Mother! is the only film I’m covering this month that I don’t particularly like. I wasn’t alone in disliking Daren Aronofsky’s delirious psychological horror movie, and it’s not a film I’ve seen mentioned very often in the 5+ years since its controversial release.

The basic plot has Jennifer Lawrence as a young woman working on renovations for a dusty, ancient Victorian mansion with her husband (Javier Bardem), dealing with the fallout of mysterious guests. Not only do these guests refuse to leave, even as “mother” (the only name Lawrence’s character is given) becomes increasingly unhinged, but their mere presence seems to be shifting the universe itself into violent chaos. The movie stays on this notion for its entire 121-minute running time, and then everything just sort of seems to end. Didn’t do a whole lot for me.

While Mother! has some great performances by Bardem, Lawence, Michelle Pfiefer, and Ed Harris (always a welcome figure in a spooky setting), I found it mostly boring and frustrating. Martin Scorsese would think I’m way off the mark. Not only did he go to bat for the film in an essay, but he harshly criticized Rotten Tomatoes, and the state of film criticism at that point in time. “Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I’m still experiencing weeks after I saw it,” he said.

 

4. Pearl (2022)

Director: Ti West

Movies like Pearl, a prequel to Ti West’s phenomenal, nasty throwback X, are bound to at least interest me. Filling in the gaps of a woman we met in X, there’s two things anchoring Pearl as one of the best movies of 2022. Obviously, the top of any list of why this movie works so beautifully and frighteningly in its story of a repressed young woman coming into her grisly own in rural Texas in 1918, is because Mia Goth is astonishing. We met Mia Goth’s depiction of Pearl in X, but only as a very old woman. Pearl shows us what got her to that point, as she cares for her dying father, lives under the oppression of her mother and a brutal pandemic, and dreams of something greater.

The other thing that makes Pearl so effective as a horror film and character study of a woman who could be gently described as ambitious would have to be Ti West as co-screenwriter and director. West has already proven himself to be a filmmaker who can find new and often shocking twists to old ideas and certainly to balance out our expectations.

It’s not a huge surprise that Scorsese loved the movie. “I was enthralled,” he said, “Then disturbed, then so unsettled that I had trouble getting to sleep. But I couldn’t stop watching.”

 

3. Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Director: John M. Stahl

I’ve taken movie recommendations from just about everyone and everywhere in my life. Martin Scorsese is certainly one of those sources and Leave Her to Heaven is the only film on this list that I was directly inspired by the filmmaker to seek out.

It gets a meaty segment in his 1995 documentary series A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, with a noirish plot about a woman (the great Gene Tierney) who becomes obsessed with a writer (Cornel Wilde) she meets on a train. So much so that she dumps her fiancé (a fantastic Vincent Price) and works her way into her new love interest’s life. They do get married, but things quickly deteriorate from there in one of the most memorable psychological dramas of the time.

Leave Her to Heaven still crackles with life and powerful performances. The story is relatively timeless, and all of this would be true even if Scorsese didn’t consider it among his favorites. Gene Tierney is a pitiable, tragic, and frightening figure, with a ruthlessness that stays with you for a long time. The movie is technically beautiful, but it’s her performance that makes the film truly special. Scorsese once said of the film, “It’s like a film noir in color. It’s the technicolor, how it’s matched to the strange perfection in Tierney’s face, her presence. The drama of the obsession of the color, reinforce each other and create something very special.”

 

2. Isle of the Dead (1945)

Director: Val Lewton

I knew Martin Scorsese was a fan of low budget horror legend Val Lewton, producer of Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie. What I didn’t know was that Lewton’s 1945 production of Isle of the Dead, the second to last in his powerhouse run at RKO, was among Scorsese’s 11 favorite horror movies of all time (as of 2009). I didn’t see this Boris Karloff vehicle (Karloff did three phenomenal movies with Lewton) until just a few years ago. It might be my favorite of Lewton’s RKO movies, with Karloff achieving an incredible performance of a deeply flawed, fascinating, and agonized man.

Karloff’s performance is mixed up beautifully with some of the best low budget atmosphere I’ve ever seen, and everything from the disjointed editing to Katherine Emery’s terrifying performance only makes that atmosphere more absorbing. It sincerely scared me in places, which doesn’t happen too often with horror movies this far back in history. Director Mark Robson directed several for Lewton and worked as an editor on others. At this point he understands exactly how to bring together on a very thin budget the elements of a potentially great horror story of love, madness, and the plague during the Balkan Wars of 1912.

Isle of the Dead runs at a vicious 72-minutes. It’s unreal how fast, violent, and haunted things get, and nothing in this movie slows down or disappoints.

 

1. BlacKkKlansman (2018)

Director: Spike Lee

BlacKkKlansman is loosely based on the story of Ron Stallworth, tasked as Colorado Springs’ first Black police officer with infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan in the 1970s. It’s likely to go down as another one of Spike Lee’s best. Fusing a biographical narrative to a freewheeling, tension-sustaining, and at times visually exhilarating movie, the result is something I’ve been repeatedly tempted to call an action movie. It’s not really, and there’s a lot more going on here than visceral thrills, intense editing, and some very well-timed moments of humor and effective filmmaking.

Still, if I wanted someone to see the kind of dynamic directing Spike Lee has been bringing to his projects for some 40 years, I would strongly consider starting with BlacKkKlansman. It’s not his most famous film, but it’s a great exclamation point for his career up to this point, and on the decade itself. The movie is in some ways a response to the 2010s, and that’s the kind of energy that runs along the great script, cinematography, and production design.

Martin Scorsese proved to be a big fan of BlacKkKlansman and has been an admirer of Lee’s for a long time. They’ve even worked together on projects, including Spike Lee’s underrated 1995 crime drama Clockers. His reaction to BlacKkKlansman however seemed to go beyond just a friendship. “Because it’s not only real, what you’re seeing up there on the screen — it’s happening,” Scorsese said. “It is happening. And it’s sanctioned by government,” Scorsese said. “It transcends the medium, what he did there in the last 10 minutes. It’s cinema and it’s beautiful.”

While it would be silly to agree with every opinion of Scorsese’s, and while you should take film suggestions from every corner you can find them, I do appreciate his ability sometimes to sum it up for me. The reasoning of an established master of any artform is always invaluable for not just curation, but for bouncing your own opinions and ideas off something that’s interesting.

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