Next Tuesday, Martin Scorsese will receive an Academy Award nomination for best director, and his film, “The Aviator,” will pick up many others, including a nod for best picture. It will be the fifth nomination for Mr. Scorsese as director, and will bring the total number of nominations for his movies close to a billion.

Like Hawks, Hitchcock, and Michael Powell – three of his strongest influences – he has never won, but there is much speculation among the speculating class that this may finally be his year. In light of the company he’d keep – don’t forget Messrs. Kubrick, Cassavetes, and Altman – there may be no better proof that Mr. Scorsese is a filmmaker of the first rank than if he never won an Oscar for his direction.

Should he win for “The Aviator,” it will be in recognition of a very good movie, but it will also serve as a nod of approval to a stubborn, angst-ridden New York filmmaker for making a razzle-dazzle biopic set in the golden age of Hollywood. As when Al Pacino won the best actor award for his hoo-hah! histrionics in “Scent of a Woman,” the Academy will be honoring a legend whose previous excellence was too tough, unsettling, or subtle to merit middlebrow canonization.

But then “The Aviator” is not as straightforward as it seems. Critics have drawn attention to the influence of “Citizen Kane,” but not to the influence of David Cronenberg’s “Crash.” They’ve gushed over the crash-into-Beverly Hills set-piece but paid no mind to the astonishing sound design of the first hour, a wall-to-wall mix of pop music as ingenious and exact as anything in “Casino.” The characterization of Hughes has been dismissed as shallow, lacking an “interior” dimension. Why not appreciate “The Aviator” as a movie brazen enough to dramatize the 20th-century vortex through the eyes of an obsessive-compulsive enigma?

This is not “The Aviator” being nominated for Oscars, but it’s the one that will fascinate 20 years from now.

All Scorsese movies improve with time. When it first came out, “Casino” looked like a sleek Las Vegas remake of “Goodfellas.” After several viewings over the years, I’d call it very nearly the equal of his 1990 masterpiece. It is one of the most rapid and kaleidoscopic of contemporary movies, three blistering hours of glitter and bruise, a dizzying head-rush of pure, potent spectacle. You want a moral to the story? What possible moral could be diagnosed from the monumental madness of Las Vegas? It exists, and Mr. Scorsese has given it to us in all its neon fear and loathing.

The ferocious black comedy “After Hours,” recently released for the first time on DVD, has not only improved but now serves as an enchanting time capsule of vanished downtown bohemia. Griffin Dunne stars as a word-processing dweeb who ventures into the increasingly bizarre labyrinth of late-night SoHo, haunting ground of uncanny women, moody artists, leather daddies, and other demimonde eccentrics. With its desolate, cast-iron canyons, rambunctious new-wave nightclubs, and creepy underground sculpture studios, the low-rent De Chirico surrealism of “After Hours” looks positively romantic now that Bloomingdale’s is the edgy new thing on lower Broadway.

If “After Hours” is cherished as an 1980s cinema oddity, it is underappreciated as a chapter in Mr. Scorsese’s ongoing cine-chronicle of New York City. Rich fusions of fact and fiction, this geography of the New York imagination locates its bedrock in the brutal archetypes of “Gangs of New York,” flowers into the 19th-century pageant of “The Age of Innocence,” charts the mean streets of living memory in the crime and gangster pictures, then races through the Hell’s Kitchen fantasia of “Bringing Out the Dead.”

Opening today at Film Forum, the 1974 documentary “Italian American,” a loving portrait of the filmmaker’s parents, belongs to this strain of the Scorsese oeuvre. It shares a double bill with the little-seen “American Boy,” a documentary portrait of Steven Prince, best known as the motor-mouthed black-marketed Easy Andy in “Taxi Driver.” What’s left to say about that undiminished 1976 classic? Only that the recent re-release at Film Forum afforded an opportunity to marvel anew at the woozy heat of Michael Ballhaus’s cinematography and to swoon at the spooky grandeur of Bernard Hermann’s score.

Aside from what they tell us about their subjects, the “American” documentaries point to Mr. Scorsese’s insatiable appetite for storytelling. Few films top “Goodfellas” for sheer narrative profusion: You could spin dozens of interesting pictures from its sprawling, micro-detailed universe. Like “Mean Streets,” “Taxi Driver,” and “Raging Bull” (which will be screening at the Ziegfeld January 28), “Goodfellas” is one of Mr. Scorsese’s official masterpieces.

It’s often in Mr. Scorsese’s overlooked films, however, that one finds the full range of his humanity and daring. One clever scene in the first season of “The Sopranos” shows Chris Moltisanti stuck behind the velvet rope of a Manhattan nightclub when a limousine rolls up carrying Mr. Scorsese. Awestruck, the young mafioso raises his fist in respect and says, simply, “Kundun. I liked it.”

It’s meant as a joke – props to a paisan – but I’d say it smartens up the Moltisanti character. He’s right: “Kundun” is one of Mr. Scorsese’s richest, most unexpected masterworks. Perhaps the most empathic meditation on Eastern spirituality ever made by an American director, it is also one of the most radical biopics to come out of Hollywood.

Working from a hushed, lucid script by Melissa Mathison, Mr. Scorsese rather casually recounts the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. What interests him is far more elusive: to reflect onscreen the light and music of consciousness itself. In “Kundun,” narrative is a medium for the evocation of mental states. With great sensitivity and concentration, the film embodies a way of living in, moving through, and caring for a culture on the verge of extinction. The camera moves through space like an exhalation of smoke: mobile, delicate, sensitive to objects and architecture, reactive to the most attenuated psychological drafts.

The stirring final passage, a recounting of the Dalai Lama’s exodus from Tibet, unspools in a single, half-hour movement. The narrative shows us a man fleeing danger, but the filmmaking aims to evoke a complex emotion of spirituality going into exile. The film’s viscous aesthetic culminates in a wash of dissolves from scene to scene: space and time become relative, transparent; dream, vision, and reality co-exist on the same perceptual plane.

All this from a working-class Italian Catholic born and bred on Elizabeth Street.

If audiences and critics failed to appreciate the visionary nature of “Kundun,” they likewise failed to see the full audacity of “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Incredibly, this ardent, reckless film was barely mentioned in the endless discourse surrounding “The Passion of the Christ.”

No one contrasted Mel Gibson’s alienating, faux-authentic use of Aramaic to Mr. Scorsese’s inspired use of contemporary dialects, a risky effect that not only indicated the linguistic eclecticism of the setting, but strove for direct address with a contemporary audience. No one compared the precise physicality of Willem Dafoe’s performance to the mute masochism of Jim Caviezel’s characterization. And how is it that no one heard “The Passion’s” wholesale theft of Peter Gabriel’s intricate “Temptation” instrumentals?

This seductive, voluptuous music jars against the dissonant opening mood of “Temptation,” a striking (if perhaps inadvertent) rhetorical strategy that suggests the struggle of Jesus’s doubt against the harmonic presence of God’s calling. A third of the way in, this angularity of tone begins to resolve in the extraordinary Sermon on the Mount sequence. Eyes ablaze, Mr. Dafoe’s performance moves into a higher gear, and the unruly energies of the movie snap into focus. There’s a palpable spiritual lift to the scene, but also a tough-minded acknowledgement that to some in the gathering crowd, here is just another half-mad would-be messiah.

It is as it was: Such careful, grownup realism shames the narrow-minded extremity of “The Passion of the Christ.” Mr. Scorsese’s blasphemy is merely this: he dares to give us a raw, unsentimental image of Jesus the man, covered in dust and sweat, tormented by very real fear and doubt. The escalation of Christ’s divine fervor is a glorious but fearsome sight, and it’s a testament to the disturbing power of cinematic representation – not to mention the filmmaker’s genius – that such a humble, impassioned treatment of gospel unnerved so many.

As for the hysteria surrounding the controversial temptation sequence, it might stand as one of the more overblown cases of misinterpretation if it hadn’t sunk the movie. Mr. Scorsese more than recovered from the failure of his long-cherished project – his very next feature was “Goodfellas.” “The Last Temptation of Christ” will continue to inspire and awe. As will its creator, America’s greatest living filmmaker.

“Raging Bull” at Clearview’s Ziegfeld Theater January 28 at 7 p.m. (141 W. 54th Street, 212-777-3456).