New to Martin Scorsese? These 6 Movies on Tubi Are Your Starter Pack
Your Martin Scorsese starter watchlist has gangsters, boxers, doomed romantics, rock legends, and Robert De Niro causing problems in six essential movies on Tubi.
Maybe you know Martin Scorsese because Travis Bickle asked, “You talkin' to me?” Maybe Goodfellas permanently changed the way you hear “Layla.” Maybe your introduction involved Leonardo DiCaprio having an absolutely terrible time for approximately three hours. Or maybe you've spent years hearing film people say “Scorsese” with the confidence that no further explanation is required and you're finally ready to see what all the fuss is about.
Good news: there isn't one correct place to start. Tubi's Martin Scorsese Essentials collection currently stretches from the scrappy New York streets of his early career to boxing rings, 19th-century drawing rooms, rock-and-roll history, and the enormous historical canvas of Gangs of New York. These six Martin Scorsese movies on Tubi aren't meant to rank the man's filmography, so Scorsese fans, please lower the pitchforks. Instead, think of them as six different entrances depending on what kind of movie night you're after.
Pick your Marty. Just don't expect everybody to make excellent life choices.
Taxi Driver
New York doesn't simply provide the backdrop for Taxi Driver; it seems to be sweating right alongside Travis Bickle. Robert De Niro plays the insomniac cabbie drifting through the city at night as loneliness, anger, and his increasingly distorted sense of purpose begin feeding one another. One of the defining films of the Scorsese-De Niro partnership, Taxi Driver keeps you uncomfortably close to Travis without asking you to endorse where his mind is going, while Bernard Herrmann's score makes the city feel seductive and threatening at the same time.
And then there's “You talkin' to me?” One of cinema's most quoted lines has been parodied so often that finally encountering it inside the actual movie can feel like discovering the source code. If you want quintessential Scorsese of New York, alienation, De Niro, and a protagonist whose internal warning lights are all flashing, then your cab has arrived.
Raging Bull
Raging Bull gives De Niro the gloves as real-life boxer Jake LaMotta, but anyone expecting a conventional rise-of-the-champion sports movie should probably adjust the betting odds. Jake's greatest opponent isn't waiting across the boxing ring. It's his own jealousy, rage, and talent for destroying the relationships around him.
Scorsese and editor Thelma Schoonmaker turn the fights into something almost expressionistic: black-and-white photography, flashes, slow motion, and brutal sound make every bout feel less like televised sport and more like being trapped inside Jake's head. De Niro famously transforms physically for the role, but the uglier transformation is emotional. It's a boxing movie, technically. A victory-lap sports movie, absolutely not.
Mean Streets
Long before his crime movies became events, Mean Streets was already putting the pieces of Martin Scorsese's crime-movie style on the table. Harvey Keitel plays Charlie, a small-time hood trying to reconcile Catholic guilt, criminal ambition, and loyalty to his spectacularly unreliable friend Johnny Boy. Then a young Robert De Niro walks in with the energy of a man who has never encountered a situation he couldn't make worse.
The movie feels alive in a way that polished gangster epics sometimes don't: cramped bars, red light, rock songs exploding onto the soundtrack, and young men acting invincible while making decisions that suggest otherwise. Watch it after Scorsese's later gangster and crime movies and you'll recognize the DNA everywhere. Crime. Faith. Guilt. New York. De Niro being a problem. The family recipe was already cooking.
The Age of Innocence
Nobody gets whacked in The Age of Innocence. There are no guns. No crime. No gangsters. But there is Daniel Day-Lewis' Newland Archer getting caught between his engagement to Winona Ryder's May Welland and his growing feelings for Michelle Pfeiffer's Countess Ellen Olenska, all while navigating the suffocating rules of 1870s New York society. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, the period romance is your reminder that Scorsese's filmography goes far beyond gangster movies.
But look closer and this world isn't that far removed from Scorsese's criminal ecosystems. Everybody knows the rules. Reputation is currency. Stepping out of line has consequences. People communicate threats without necessarily saying them aloud. The difference is that nobody needs a gun when one carefully calculated dinner invitation can do the damage. Scorsese turns Edith Wharton's romance into proof that yearning can be every bit as brutal as violence. Scorsese turns romantic yearning into its own form of brutality.
The Last Waltz
On Thanksgiving Day 1976, The Band gathered at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom for what was billed as its farewell concert. Scorsese brought cameras. The resulting The Last Waltz brings in Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and more for the kind of guest list that makes “one last show” sound suspiciously understated.
Widely regarded as one of the landmark concert films, The Last Waltz shows that what makes something essential Scorsese isn't simply who's onstage or whether somebody has committed a felony. He treats a concert with the same attention to character, movement, and atmosphere that he gives narrative cinema, making the performances feel intimate even when rock history is happening directly in front of the lens.
Gangs of New York
By Gangs of New York, the intimate streets of Mean Streets have become an enormous 1860s battlefield. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Amsterdam Vallon, who returns to Five Points seeking revenge against Bill the Butcher, the gang leader who killed his father. Unfortunately for Amsterdam, Bill is played by Daniel Day-Lewis, who enters the movie wearing a top hat, wielding knives, and behaving like restraint was removed from his contract.
The scale is huge, but the classic Scorsese obsessions are familiar: loyalty, violence, group identity, power, and the complicated history underneath New York itself. It also opens the door to Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio's long-running collaboration. De Niro helped define one era; DiCaprio would become central to another. Welcome to blockbuster Marty. Bill the Butcher will be handling orientation.