Martin Scorsese’s Ten Favourite Criterion Films, and the Ones That Stay With You
Some favourite-film lists feel like a map. Martin Scorsese’s Criterion selection feels more like a set of memories: a childhood television screening, the shock of a first encounter, a film that changes when you return to it years later.
Criterion invited Scorsese to choose ten titles. He accepted the invitation with a list that crosses continents and eras. The films are not arranged as a universal canon. They are films he has lived with, and his notes show how a movie can keep changing in the mind.
1. Paisan (Roberto Rossellini, 1946)
Six episodes move through Italy near the end of the Second World War, following encounters between civilians and Allied soldiers. Scorsese remembers its emotional force through his grandparents, who had left Italy. The film’s rough, immediate realism meets the personal weight of seeing a homeland changed.
2. The Red Shoes (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1948)
A young ballerina is pulled between her love for a composer and the demands of the impresario who has made her career. Its vivid artifice makes the world of performance feel both enchanting and dangerous. Scorsese says he returns to it, and sees something different each time.
3. The River (Jean Renoir, 1951)
Set in India, the film follows a British family and the emotional awakening of its eldest daughter. Renoir treats adolescence as part of a larger rhythm of change and continuity. Scorsese’s note is attentive to the way the film lets life unfold without forcing it into a conventional plot.
4. Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)
During civil war, two villagers pursue wealth and status while their families are left exposed to danger. A ghost story and a domestic tragedy meet in Mizoguchi’s spare, haunting compositions. Scorsese singles out its images as experiences that can still take his breath away.
5. Ashes and Diamonds (Andrzej Wajda, 1958)
On the day the Second World War ends in Poland, a young resistance fighter is ordered to assassinate a communist official. Scorsese writes about the film’s nightmare-like visual world and its political uncertainty at the edge of peace. The performance of Zbigniew Cybulski gives that uncertainty a human face.
6. L’avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)
A woman disappears during a Mediterranean island trip; the search gradually shifts attention to the people who remain. The absence is less a mystery to solve than a force that changes how the characters relate to one another. Scorsese resists the familiar shorthand of “alienation” and reads it as spiritual distress.
7. Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962)
Rosi investigates the death of the Sicilian bandit through an intricate political mosaic rather than a single central hero. Scorsese connects the film’s structure and black-and-white images to its affection for Sicily and its account of corruption. It is historical inquiry made with the movement of a thriller.
8. 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963)
A filmmaker faces the impossible follow-up to a celebrated success and tries to make a movie while memory, fantasy and pressure crowd in. Scorsese sees in Guido’s creative paralysis a portrait of the artist searching for enough quiet to hear himself think. It remains a touchstone for him.
9. Contempt (Jean-Luc Godard, 1963)
A screenwriter’s marriage frays while he works on a film about the Odyssey. Godard places domestic conflict beside the machinery of filmmaking, turning a production story into a lament for a changing cinema. Scorsese says the film has grown more moving to him over time.
10. The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)
During Italian unification, an aristocratic prince recognises that his family’s world is ending and makes room for the generation that will replace it. Visconti’s sumptuous scale serves a quiet subject: time passing through rituals, landscapes and a long formal ball. Scorsese describes the film as increasingly important to him.
A list made of return visits
These selections span different countries and filmmaking traditions, but they share an insistence on looking again. Scorsese’s comments rarely close a film down with a final verdict. They explain what the work opens up for him: family memory, political history, a camera movement, the possibility of seeing something anew.
That is a more generous idea of a favourite than a ranking. A film can belong to you because it met you at the right time. It can also meet you again, years later, as a different film.
Sources and further reading
- The Criterion Collection: Martin Scorsese’s Top 10
- List artwork, The Criterion Collection
- Film image, The Criterion Collection
Selection and film details checked against the cited Criterion Collection source on October 5, 2026. Film artworks remain the property of their respective rights holders.
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