Martin Scorsese is one of the greatest living filmmakers, with an inimitable style that’s entirely his own, but some of his imitators have come surprisingly close to creating their own Scorsese movie. Whenever a director comes along with their own unique style, a lot of copycats tend to follow. The emergence of Quentin Tarantino led to a slew of ultraviolent crime thrillers throughout the ‘90s, from Dobermann to Things to Do in Denver When You’re ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. The popularity of Judd Apatow’s comedies in the 2000s led to an overuse of improvisation across all of film comedy.

Scorsese’s stylish, energetic approach to crime films — with dark humor, voiceover narration, and zippy nonlinear editing — has been emulated by countless movies in the half a century he’s been a renowned voice in cinema. The most recent gangster movie to mimic Scorsese’s style is Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights, which casts Scorsese’s go-to leading man Robert De Niro in not one, but two roles, and it comes pretty close to recapturing the unmistakable feel of a Scorsese movie. And it’s not the only Scorsese imitator to do so; movies like Boogie Nights and American Made have pulled it off, too.

10

Donnie Brasco

Before Scorsese came along, mafia movies tended to follow the tradition of The Godfather. They revolved around the head honchos at the top of the pile and told their stories in a classy manner. But Goodfellas ushered in a new era of street-level gangster movies that revolved around mid-tier mobsters who have to do the dirty work for the guys at the top of the pile. One of the best Scorsese imitators in this tradition is Mike Newell’s Donnie Brasco. Much like Scorsese’s crime films, it’s a contemplative character study disguised as a violent gangster movie.

9

American Hustle

David O. Russell tried his hand at a Scorsese-style crime film with American Hustle. Inspired by the FBI’s Abscam operation of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, American Hustle stars Christian Bale and Amy Adams as a pair of fraudsters who reluctantly team up with an FBI agent played by Bradley Cooper to run a convoluted sting on crooked politicians. American Hustle has all the makings of a Scorsese movie: a complicated crime saga, a pitch-black comedic sensibility, a gray approach to morality, a soundtrack full of classic rock — it even has a cameo appearance by De Niro.

8

Joker

Todd Phillips’ record-breaking billion-dollar blockbuster Joker is essentially a mashup of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. It’s a gritty urban vigilante movie, like Taxi Driver, and it’s a psychological study of an aspiring comedian who lives with his mother, like The King of Comedy. Joker’s exploration of its themes is much shallower than Scorsese’s masterpieces, but cinematographer Lawrence Sher perfectly captures the seedy underbelly of a crime-ridden city, like Michael Chapman, and Joaquin Phoenix perfectly captures the dark mental gymnastics that lead an ordinary man to become a killer, like De Niro.

7

Lord Of War

Andrew Niccol’s Lord of War is essentially a version of Goodfellas that switches out drug trafficking for arms trafficking. It shares Goodfellas’ manic cinematic energy and bleak sense of humor, but it revolves around a criminal who gets rich off the sale of weapons around the dissolution of the Soviet Union, not one who gets rich off the cocaine trade. Lord of War explores a very different illicit industry than Goodfellas, but it explores it in just as much depth and with just as much stylistic verve. It has one of the most memorable opening sequences in movie history.

6

The Alto Knights

The Alto Knights has all the hallmarks of a Scorsese gangster film: freeze frames, voiceover narration, nonlinear storytelling, contemporary needle-drops on the soundtrack, De Niro in the lead role(s), a screenplay by Nicholas Pileggi, and a fascinating true-crime tale from the mean streets of New York. De Niro plays dual roles as childhood friends who grew up to become rival mob bosses, one of whom ordered a botched hit on the other. The Alto Knights doesn’t have the thoughtful introspection or brutal honesty that make Scorsese’s mob movies so great, but it is just as entertaining, well-sH๏τ, and darkly hilarious.

5

American Made

Doug Liman’s American Made plays like a more action-packed version of a Scorsese crime biopic. Tom Cruise plays Barry Seal, a pilot who became a drug smuggler for the Medellín Cartel and an informant for the DEA. Much like Goodfellas, American Made uses its larger-than-life true story to explore both sides of the law, and the fine line between good and evil. And, much like Goodfellas, it’s a wildly entertaining ride that doesn’t leave its audience bored for a second. It takes some liberties with the historical events it depicts, but it’s a real capital-M movie.

4

I, Tonya

Craig Gillespie made the ingenious decision to dramatize Tonya Harding’s involvement in the ᴀssault on Nancy Kerrigan in the style of a Scorsese gangster movie. Similar to Goodfellas, I, Tonya has rapid-paced editing and a healthy dose of dark humor. Harding tells the story as an unreliable narrator who breaks the fourth wall. I, Tonya could’ve easily fallen into the trap of being a dull, serious true-crime drama, but Gillespie and producer/star Margot Robbie took a much more daring approach that made the movie a lot more memorable and a lot more entertaining.

3

City Of God

The way Scorsese captures the criminal underworld of New York in Mean Streets, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund capture the criminal underworld of Rio de Janeiro in City of God. Where Scorsese focused on Little Italy in Mean Streets, City of God focuses on Rio’s Cidade de Deus suburb. Much like Scorsese, they don’t bring the world of organized crime to the screen through tired genre archetypes; their characters are real, three-dimensional human beings. In chronicling an epic crime saga spanning decades, Meirelles and Lund use Scorsese’s signature fast pacing and energetic editing to keep the narrative momentum going.

2

A Bronx Tale

When De Niro made his directorial debut, he took a lot of inspiration from his collaborations with Scorsese. Based on Chazz Palminteri’s autobiographical play of the same name, A Bronx Tale tells the coming-of-age story of a young Italian-American man who’s torn between the mentorship of his hard-working blue-collar dad and a local mob boss who takes a shine to him. Much like Scorsese’s crime films, A Bronx Tale captures the lifestyle of the mafia and the atmosphere of New York with raw authenticity, and it chronicles city-wide tensions and organized crime from a deeply personal place.

1

Boogie Nights

After his low-budget indie debut Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson got much more ambitious with his second movie. Boogie Nights is a mega-scale three-hour epic set in the adult film industry of the 1970s. It has a sprawling ensemble cast, a complex web of plotlines, and a well-rounded world.

Anderson heavily channels Scorsese in his direction of Boogie Nights. The filmmaking has the fidgety pacing, sweeping camera movements, ever-changing soundtrack, and all-over-the-place editing of Goodfellas and Casino, but the rise and fall of Mark Wahlberg’s pornstar character Dirk Diggler mirrors that of boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. In the final scene of Boogie Nights, Anderson even includes a direct homage to the ending of Raging Bull. Of all the copycats that have tried to mimic Martin Scorsese’s style, Boogie Nights has come the closest to matching Scorsese’s raw intensity, thought-provoking themes, and absolute cinema.