Martin Scorsese, shaped by French New Wave and Italian Neo-realism and inspired by filmmakers like Satyajit Ray and Federico Fellini, crafts films that delve into themes of guilt, redemption, and identity. His notable works, such as “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” and “The Last Temptation of Christ” mirror his personal ideology. The list of Scorseseโs Favourite Films unveils the top 10 movies that have significantly influenced his unique cinematic vision, offering insight into the artistic inspirations behind his acclaimed filmography.
Paisan [1946] | Roberto Rossellini | Italy

Inย My Voyage to Italy,ย the documentary that we made about Italian cinema, we started with this picture. For me, it really was the beginning. I saw it for the first time on television with my grandparents, and their overwhelming reaction to what had happened to their homeland since they left at the turn of the century was just as present and vivid for me as the images and the characters.
I was experiencing the power of cinema itself, in this case, made far beyond Hollywood, under extremely tough conditions and with inferior equipment. And I was also seeing that cinema wasnโt just about the movie itself but the relationship between the movie and its audience. Fellini said that when Rossellini was filming the Po Valley sequence, he acted on pure instinct, inventing freely as he went along. The resultโin that episode, and in the Sicilian and Neapolitan and Florentine episodes as wellโis still startling: itโs like seeing reality itself unfolding before your eyes. Here is the first entry in the list of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.
Also, Read: Needle Drop In Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman
The Red Shoes [1948] | Michael Powell,ย Emeric Pressburger | UK
Iโve said and written so much about this picture over the years; for me itโs always been one of the very greatest ever made, and every time I go back to look at itโabout once a yearโitโs new: it reveals another side, another level, and it goes deeper. What is it thatโs so special aboutย The Red Shoes? Of course, itโs beautiful, one of the most beautiful Technicolor films ever made; it has such an extraordinary sense of magicโlook again at the scene where Moira Shearer is walking up the steps to Anton Walbrookโs villa, especially in the new restoration: it seems like sheโs floating on currents of sparkling light and air.
And thereโs no other picture that dramatizes and visualizes the overwhelming obsession of art, the way it can take over your life. But on a deeper level, in the movement and energy of the filmmaking itself, is a deep and abiding love of art, aย belief in art as a genuinely transcendent state. Here is the second entry in the list of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.
The River [1951] | Jean Renoir | France/India/US
The years right after the war were a very special time in cinema, all around the world. Millions were slaughtered, entire cities were levelled, humanityโs faith in itself was shaken. The greatest filmmakers were moved to create meditations on existence, on the miracle of life itself. They didnโt look away from harshness and violenceโquite the contrary. Rather, they dealt with them directly and then looked beyond, from a greater and more benign distance.
Iโm thinking of Rosselliniโs The Flowers of St. Francisย andย Europa โ51,ย the great neorealist films by Visconti and De Sica, Mizoguchiโsย Ugetsuย andย Sansho the Bailiff,ย Kurosawaโsย Ikiruย andย Seven Samurai,ย Wylerโsย The Best Years of Our Lives,Fordโsย My Darling Clementineย andย Wagon Master, and this remarkable picture. This was Jean Renoirโs first picture after his American period, his first in colour, and he used Rumer Goddenโs autobiographical novel to create a film that is, really, about life, a film without a real story that is all about the rhythm of existence, the cycles of birth and death and regeneration, and the transitory beauty of the world.
Ugetsu [1953] | Kenji Mizoguchi| Japan
Mizoguchi is one of the greatest masters who ever worked in the medium of film; heโs right up there with Renoir and Murnau and Ford, and after the war he made three picturesโThe Life of Oharu, Ugetsu,ย andย Sansho the Bailiffโthat stand at the summit of cinema. All of his artistry is channelled into the most extraordinary simplicity. Youโre face-to-face with something mysterious, tragically inevitable, and then, in the end, peacefully removed.
I love all three of these pictures and many other Mizoguchi films as well (including Princess Yang Kwei-fei, The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums,ย andย Miss Oyu,ย to name only a few), butย Ugetsu has the most powerful effect on me. There are moments in the picture, famous ones, that Iโve seen again and again and that always take my breath away: the boat slowly materializing from out of the mist and coming toward us . . . Genjuro collapsing on the grass in ecstasy and being smothered by Lady Wakasa . . . the final crane up from the son making an offering at his motherโs grave to the fields beyond. Just to think of these moments now fills me with awe and wonder. Here is the fourth entry in the list of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.
Ashes and Diamonds [1958] | Andrzej Wajda | Poland
I sawย Ashes and Diamonds for the first time in 1961. And even back then, during that period when we expected to be astonished at the movies when things were happening all over the world, it shocked me. It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that wonโt stop unfolding; the sense of maddening insanity and absurdity, the tragedy of political infighting on the brink of peace and coming of age during wartime; and the beauty of the lead actor, Zbigniew Cybulski. The film has the power of a hallucination: I can close my eyes and certain images will flashback to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over fifty years ago.
Iโve crossed paths with Andrzej Wajda a few times over the years, and Iโve always been in awe of his energy and his unflinching vision. I saw him again a couple of years ago, a little frailer but still as burning with energy as heโd been back in the โ90s, and he was preparing to make another film, now just completed, about Lech Walesa (the final installment of the trilogy that began with Man of Marbleย andย Man of Iron). Heโs a model to all filmmakers. Here is the fifth entry in the list of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.
Ashes and Diamonds [1958] Review โ A Wartime Story Told in Bold Visual Terms
The Adventure [1960] | Michelangelo Antonioni| Italy
Hereโs another film of which so much has been said and written over the years that you wind up thinking: Thereโs nothing left to say . . . But of course, thatโs always a cop-out because itโs never trueโthereโs always more to say about a film, to see it again is to see it anew, to see it in 2014 as opposed to 1960 is a very different experience, and for some people it will literally be brand-new (to those people, I would say, simply:ย Seeย it!ย Now!!).
Itโs difficult to think of a film that has a more powerful understanding of the way that people are bound to the world around them, by what they see and touch and taste and hears. I realize that Lโavventurais supposed to be about characters who are โalienatedโ from their surroundings, but that word has been used so often to describe this film and Antonioniโs films in general that it more or less shuts down though. In fact, I see it, more than ever, as a movie about people in spiritual distress: their spiritual signals are disrupted, which is why they see the world around them as hostile and unforgiving. Visually, sensually, thematically, dramatically, in every way, itโs one of the great works of cinema.
Salvatore Giuliano [1962] | Francesco Rosi | Italy
Francesco Rosiโs great historical and political mosaic is a dramatic inquiry into the circumstances around the assassination of the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. On one level, itโs an extremely complex film: thereโs no central protagonist (Giuliano himself is not a character but a figure around which the action pivots), and it shifts between time frames and points of view. But itโs also a picture made from theย inside,ย from a profound and lasting love and understanding of Sicily and its people and the treachery and corruption theyโve had to endure.
Itโs a rigorous investigation (Rosi actually uncovered new facts about the case), but itโs never dry, it has blood flowing through its veins, and itโs shot in black and white that is absolutely electrifying (the cinematographer was Gianni Di Venanzo, who shot many of the greatest Italian pictures of the โ50s and โ60s, including Antonioniโsย Lโeclisseย and Felliniโsย 8ยฝ). Andย Salvatore Giuliano is, among many other things, a grand hymn to Sicily, the land of my family, and for that reason alone I cherish it. Here is the seventh entry in the list of Martin Scorsese’s favourite films.
Salvatore Giuliano [1962] Review โ A Portrait of Sicily through the Tale of an Enigmatic Bandit
8ยฝ [1963] | Federico Fellini | Italy
What would Fellini do afterย La dolce vita? We all wondered. How would he top himself? Would he evenย wantย to top himself? Would he shift gears? Finally, he did something that no one could have anticipated at the time. He took his own artistic and life situationโthat of a filmmaker who had eight and a half films to his name (episodes for two omnibus films and a shared credit with Alberto Lattuada onย Variety Lightsย counted for him as one and a half films, plus seven), achieved international renown with his last feature and felt enormous pressure when the time came for a follow-upโand he built a movie around it.ย 8ยฝย has always been a touchstone for me, in so many waysโthe freedom, the sense of invention, the underlying rigor and the deep core of longing, the bewitching, physical pull of the camera movements and the compositions (another great black-and-white film: every image gleams like a pearlโagain, shot by Gianni Di Venanzo).
But it also offers an uncanny portrait of being the artist of the moment, trying to tune out all the pressure and the criticism and the adulation and the requests and the advice, and find the space and the calm to simply listen to oneself. The picture has inspired many movies over the years (includingย Alex in Wonderland, Stardust Memories,ย andย All That Jazz), and weโve seen the dilemma of Guido, the hero played by Marcello Mastroianni, repeated many times over in realityโlook at the life of Bob Dylan during the period we covered inย No Direction Home,ย to take just one example. Like withย The Red Shoes,ย I look at it again every year or so, and itโs always a different experience.
Contempt [1963] | Jean-Luc Godard | France
I used to think of Godard and Antonioni as the great modern visual artists of cinemaโgreat colourists who composed frames the way painters composed their canvases. I still think so, but I also connect with them on the emotional level. And for me, Contemptย is one of the most moving films of its era. At the time, people talked a lot about the unlikely combination of artists involved: a multilingual Carlo Ponti production of an Alberto Moravia novel, starring Brigitte Bardot, costarring Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance, set at Cinecittร and in the Casa Malaparte in Capri, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, with Fritz Lang as himself. The film itself got a little lost in the fixation on the details.
Itโs interesting when circumstances that seem so relevant and important at the time of a filmโs release just dissolve as the years go by. I didnโt care so much about all of that background information at the time, I just responded to what I saw on the screen, but over the yearsย Contemptย has grown increasingly, almost unbearably, moving to me. Itโs a shattering portrait of a marriage going wrong, and it cutsย veryย deep, especially during the lengthy and justifiably famous scene between Piccoli and Bardot in their apartment: even if you donโt know that Godardโs own marriage to Anna Karina was coming apart at the time, you can feel it in the action, the movement of the scenes, the interactions that stretch out so painfully butย majestically,ย like a piece of tragic music.ย Contemptย is also a lament for a kind of cinema that was disappearing at the time, embodied by Fritz Lang and the impossible adaptation ofย The Odysseyย that heโs directing. And it is a profound cinematic encounter with eternity, in which both the lost marriage and the cinema seem to dissolve. Itโs one of the most frightening great films ever made.
The Leopard [1963] | Luchino Visconti | Italy
Another masterpiece about Sicily, another meditation on eternity, and an endlessly rich historical tapestry, meticulously composed in colour and on 70 mm. Luchino Visconti based the picture on the Count Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusaโs posthumously published novel, about a Sicilian prince at the time of the Italian unification, or Risorgimento, who steps away from power and influence because he realizes that the life he and his family have led is coming to an end, that he has to get out of the way for younger and more ambitious men like his nephew Tancredi. Visconti and his fellow screenwriters (there were four of them, including his frequent collaborators Suso Cecchi DโAmico and Enrico Medioli) took Lampedusaโs novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type.
Time itself is the protagonist of The Leopard:the cosmic scale of time, of centuries and epochs, on which the prince muses; Sicilian time, in which days and nights stretch to infinity; and aristocratic time, in which nothing is ever rushed and everything happens just as it should happen, as it has always happened. The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and ritualsโitโs all at the service ofย deepeningย our sense of time and large-scale change, and the entire picture culminates in an hour-long sequence at a ball in which you can feel, through the eyes of the prince, an entire way of life (one that Visconti himself knew quite well) in the process of fading away.
Likeย Contempt, The Leopardย was initially overshadowed by the circumstances around it, namely, the casting of Burt Lancaster as the prince. Here in America, we saw the picture in a shortened and dubbed version (Lancaster was speaking English) that was a little unsatisfying: you could clearly see that the movie Visconti had intended wasnโt quite all there, and it was jarring to watch Lancaster speaking in his normal voice surrounded by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale and Paolo Stoppa dubbed into American English. When I got to see the whole thing, I was astonished by the picture and by Lancaster, who gives all of himself to the role and to the world of the film. Visconti had wanted Laurence Olivier, and he was initially very curt with Lancaster, but the actor won him over and they became lifelong friends. I could go on and on aboutย The Leopard.ย Itโs a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by.
ย Also, Read: 10 Best Films of Federico Fellini
This List Originally Features On The Criterion Website