Martin Scorsese's 7 favorite films

"2001: A Space Odyssey"

Fantastic, Detective, Adventure | 4.04 out of 5 on MyShows | 1968

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece tells the story of the crew of the spaceship Discovery, commanded by Captains Dave Bowman and Frank Poole and their on-board computer, HAL-9000. They travel to Jupiter to investigate an alien artifact, a black monolith, but during the journey, HAL-9000 develops paranoia.

Kubrick is one of Scorsese's favorite directors. He says Kubrick changed filmmaking: for example, with his unique approach to logic and narrative continuity, and with his visual effects. "2001: A Space Odyssey", according to Scorsese, "changed the way you would normally experience time, [it] forced you to react with great authority", and the end of the movie gave "extraordinary comfort in the end of the film, a very beautiful moment" to the religious part of the director's personality.

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"8½"

Fantasy, drama | 3.92 out of 5 on MyShows | 1963

Federico Fellini's drama, which won two Oscars. Guido Anselmi is preparing to shoot a new movie. Thanks to his recent success, Guido gets an impressive budget for the new film, but suddenly faces a creative crisis and only gets confused, lost in his thoughts about what the new movie should be. In the process of reflection Guido begins to remember important events in his life, all the women he has loved and abandoned.

"I watch passages in that picture, which I’ve gone back to more times than I can count, and still find myself wondering: How did he do it? How is it that each movement and gesture and gust of wind seems to fall perfectly into place? How is it that it all feels uncanny and inevitable, as in a dream? How could every moment be so rich with inexplicable longing?" — shared Scorsese on his impressions of the movie.

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"Ashes and Diamonds" / Popiół i diament

Drama, romance, war | 3.83 out of 5 on MyShows | 1958

The final film of Polish director Andrzej Wajda's "war trilogy" tells the story of Maciek, a young resistance fighter who is assigned to kill the district secretary, Commissar Szczuka.

Scorsese said: "Ashes and Diamonds" shook him up: "It had to do with the look, both immediate and haunted, like a nightmare that won’t 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 flash back to me with the force they had when I saw them for the first time over fifty years ago".

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"Citizen Kane"

Drama, Detective | 3.71 out of 5 on MyShows | 1941

A film that Scorsese admits changed his life and his view of the possibilities of cinema: "I saw "Citizen Kane" on television for the first time, and I began to become aware of editing and camera positions". Scorsese noted that while other directors tried to make movies as similar to reality, Orson Welles was not afraid to use the camera to talk to the audience.

In the story, newspaper baron Charles Foster Kane, one of the richest and most influential men in America, dies. Before his death, Kane uttered just one word: rosebud. The movie follows a reporter who digs into Kane's past to find out what that word meant.

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"Diary of a Country Priest" / Journal d'un curé de campagne

Drama | 4.17 out of 5 on MyShows | 1951

An idealistic young priest, fresh out of seminary, arrives in the small French town of Ambricourt. Despite his inexperience, he wants to help the inhabitants, but they do not accept him. In addition, the priest is suffering from a serious stomach illness, but he is not going to give up.

Not surprisingly, for Scorsese, who grew up in a devout Catholic family, "Diary of a Country Priest" by French director Robert Bresson was a really important movie. According to Scorsese, he first saw "Diary" during a crisis of faith, and the tape gave him hope: "In Bresson’s work, cruelty and hardship always frame the sudden arrival of grace, like a ray of light that cuts through pitch darkness".

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"To Live" / 生きる

Drama | 4.5 out of 5 on MyShows | 1952

Kanji Watanabe is a civil servant who has been working in the same department for 30 years. He was once full of enthusiasm and drive, but now his life is dull and monotonous. One day he learns that he has stomach cancer and has less than a year to live. Unexpectedly, Kanji realizes that he has wasted his life and decides that at least before he dies he should do something meaningful.

Akira Kurosawa, who directed "To Live", opened Scorsese's eyes to the possibilities of visual storytelling in cinema: "Like many others, I was moved by the story of an old man coming to terms with his own mortality, by the face and body language of Takashi Shimura. But I was also stunned by the way the story was told and visualized: the contrast between the quiet tenderness of most of the film and the rigor of the famous, lengthy funeral sequence, the absolute precision of the framing and the movement within the frame".

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"The Leopard" / Il gattopardo

Drama | 4 out of 5 on MyShows | 1963

The movie is set in Italy in 1860 during the Second War of Independence. The princely Salina family, like the rest of the aristocrats, are accustomed to a privileged lifestyle. But on the eve of crucial changes for the country, the family needs to figure out whose side to take and who to support.

"Luchino Visconti took Lampedusa’s novel and fashioned a whole new work on a grand scale, an epic but of a very unusual type", Scorsese said of "The Leopard." "The landscapes, the extraordinary settings with their painstakingly selected objects and designs, the costumes, the ceremonies and rituals—it’s all at the service of deepening 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 in the process of fading away. [...] It’s a film that has become more and more important to me as the years have gone by".

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For a complete list of Scorsese's favorite films, visit Sight And Sound's website.