Every Martin Scorsese Movie And Series Streaming On Netflix, Ranked

In 2017, celebrated director Martin Scorsese

entered a deal with Netflix that many thought could never happen. The company secured the rights to Scorsese’s next crime movie, The Irishman, which became available to stream on Netflix following a short theatrical run in 2019. This deal was unprecedented for a director like Scorsese and paved the way for more of his releases to appear on streaming. In fact, his Bob Dylan documentary Rolling Thunder Revue debuted on the platform before The Irishman’s release.

A limited series about New York that the director made alongside a friend appeared on Netflix two years later. The streaming giant now also plays host to classic Scorsese movies from the early 2000s. In total, Netflix offers five of Scorsese’s more recent works, spanning around two decades of his remarkable career as a filmmaker. All five movies and series have their respective merits, but perhaps only two or three of them will be remembered as the director’s very best work.

5

Gangs Of New York (2002)

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz, & Daniel Day-Lewis

Martin Scorsese’s historical epic Gangs of New York will be remembered for one thing in particular: Daniel Day-Lewis’ performance as the fictionalized leader of the Bowery Boys gang, the bloodthirsty William “Bill the Butcher” Cutting, is a masterpiece in immersive characterization even by the actor’s supreme standards. The movie is otherwise a messy affair, with an unconvincing turn from Cameron Diaz alongside Leonardo DiCaprio’s central protagonist Amsterdam Vallon.

Nevertheless, Gangs of New York features some of the best set designs of any historical movie, with its extraordinary recreation of Manhattan’s Five Points slum in the 19th century a cinematic marvel. Martin Scorsese’s tribute to the city of his birth extends to the movie’s closing sH๏τ, which beautifully illustrates how New York’s skyline changed between 1863 and 2001, the year that the Twin Towers fell victim to the 9/11 attacks.

4

Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)

Starring Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, & Patti Smith

Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story is one of the Dylan movies most worth watching aside from A Complete Unknown. To call it a documentary would be both overstating and understating things, as the movie is far more experimental and multi-faceted. Surface level, the movie follows Bob Dylan’s 1975 live tour of North America, which the singer himself dubbed the Rolling Thunder Revue. It features artists that Dylan invited on the road with him, including longtime collaborator and muse Joan Baez, friend and poet Allen Ginsberg, and punk progenitor Patti Smith.

Scorsese makes a movie that suits Dylan’s own elusive celebrity and enigmatic performance style, combining form and content in a way that few other filmmakers could.

Scorsese takes the self-consciously theatrical tour footage filmed for Dylan’s 1978 movie Renaldo and Clara and reframes it as a dramatized version of the tour itself. In this way, the director makes a movie that suits Dylan’s own elusive celebrity and enigmatic performance style, combining form and content in a way that few other filmmakers could. Rolling Thunder Revue might not have the visceral power of Scorsese’s very best works, but it’s still a testament to his ingenuity as an artist documenting other artists.

3

The Irishman (2019)

Starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, & Al Pacino

If The Irishman really is to be Martin Scorsese’s final movie collaboration with Robert De Niro, then what a way to go out. Scorsese brought together one of the all-time great crime movie casts, led by De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, with Harvel Keitel, Kathrine Narducci, and Stephen Graham in supporting roles, for a CGI-enhanced mafia epic years in the making.

The movie is a slow-burn that lends itself to a streaming platform synonymous with lengthy binge-watching sessions, but it engages throughout, anchored by De Niro’s central performance as eponymous Irishman Frank Sheeran. Al Pacino puts in his best performance in years as Jimmy Hoffa, and it’s when these two actors are on-screen together that The Irishman sparks into life. Scorsese might have had to go to development hell and back to make his biggest pᴀssion project, but it was worth the wait.

2

Pretend It’s A City (2021)

Starring Martin Scorsese & Fran Lebowitz

Pretend It’s a City marked a radical departure for the director, the first non-fiction TV project that Scorsese had ever helmed. What’s more, it involved him stepping forward from behind the camera, for a series of informal conversations with his friend and fellow New Yorker Fran Lebowitz. This series, guided principally by the wit and distinctive narrative style of author and commentator Lebowitz, is one of the most unconventional documents ever made of New York. It’s also one of the most brilliant, which is saying something considering the literally thousands of тιтles produced about the city.

Each episode sees Scorsese and Lebowitz focus on a different aspect of daily life in New York that only its inhabitants would choose to focus on, from its subways to its libraries. By the end, it feels as though we’ve spent several days in the company of two wonderfully funny and charming relatives who just happen to reside in New York, but have shown us secrets of the great metropolis that no tour guide nor sightseeing holiday ever could.

1

The Departed (2006)

Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, & Martin Sheen

Ultimately, though, Scorsese isn’t regarded as one of the finest movie directors to have come out of New York for his conversational docuseries. Scorsese is known for making some of the best gangster movies of modern times. His Oscar-winning The Departed fits into this category, and might just be the hardest-hitting crime film of the lot. Featuring a galaxy of acting talent, The Departed more than lives up to its billing, delivering two and a half hours of shady dealings, scintillating acting, and heart-stopping suspense.

Jack Nicholson, in particular, appears to relish his role as turncoat mob boss Frank Costello, who’s based on the Winter Hill Gang leader Whitey Bulger. Overall, The Departed deserves its place alongside Scorsese’s crime genre classics from the ’70s to the ’90s. The fact that it’s one of just two Martin Scorsese gangster movies available on Netflix should provide it with the retrospective attention it truly deserves.