For Fans of Martin Scorsese

Everyone points new Scorsese fans toward The Godfather, which is understandable but wrong. Goodfellas is where the full Scorsese method first fires on all cylinders: the voiceover, the needle drops, the freeze frames, the tracking shot into the Copacabana, the furious editing in the last act. It is also funnier, messier, and more honest about the smallness of gangster life than Coppola's operatic masterpiece. Start there, then go backwards to Mean Streets and forwards to The Departed.

The King of Comedy came out in 1982, between Raging Bull and the fallow mid-decade years, and audiences mostly stayed away. It is the film that looks most clearly at the 2020s from 1982: a delusional fan who manufactures celebrity through sheer refusal to accept reality, a media landscape that rewards spectacle over substance. Robert De Niro's Rupert Pupkin is scarier than any gangster Scorsese ever filmed because he is so recognizably ordinary.

If you want the Scorsese feeling in a TV-length format, Succession is the closest thing: men in suits who speak in threats, a patriarch whose approval warps every relationship around him, violence that is mostly psychological but occasionally very real. Jesse Armstrong shares Scorsese's trick of making you complicit in the luxury before pulling the rug. The whole series moves like a long tracking shot that ends somewhere nobody expected.

Killers of the Flower Moon arrived in 2023 and some viewers found it too long, too slow. Those viewers missed something essential: Scorsese deliberately withheld the detective thriller machinery he could have deployed in the first hour, keeping the camera on Osage faces and Osage grief instead of on white FBI competence. It is his most morally serious film since Silence, and probably the one future generations will consider most urgently. The Irishman repays a second watch too, once you understand that the point is the emptiness at the end.