That was my first encounter with Martin Scorsese, a director who shaped my teenage and early adult years. Possibly the greatest American filmmaker, Scorsese is incapable of making uninteresting films, thus defining his 10 best films would be a fool’s task. In curating these titles, it's less a question of greatness, but rather selecting the titles that I believe surmise Scorsese, the artist and person.

Although of an earlier vintage, the scene is reminiscent of one of the final scenes in Scorsese's Wolf of Wall Street, in which the FBI agent sits alone on a sad subway ride home. A shallow read of this type of scene describes it as a glorification of the life of the criminal: as if to say you'll find real family there, not in the hollow accolades and awards that come alongside a life of privation. Of course, a more fictional portrayal of an undercover operation, The Departed, makes no effort to be ambivalent on the nature of membership in a criminal organization.