GoodFellas

“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.”

1990. Martin Scorsese takes a memoir written by Nicolas Pileggi based on interviews with low level Mafioso Henry Hill, and fashions the most exhilarating gangster movie of them all, a film infused with the excitement, camaraderie, the sheer hard-on of fast cash, girls, guns and drugs. This is filmmaking firing on all cylinders. Yet this brazenly amoral movie is also a clear-eyed portrait of the brutality, betrayal, and spiritual void of the criminal world; a place of fear, venality and violent death — and a world Scorsese knew at first hand, growing up in Little Italy.

Scorsese returned to these people with Casino and The Irishman, each time with a greater degree of gravity and regret. But it’s debatable if he has ever bested the virtuosity of this intricately detailed and authentic movie, a pop artifact that remains his most popular film some 36 years later.

Content Considerations: Graphic violence; drug & alcohol abuse

Martin Scorsese’s brash and brilliant mob masterpiece from 1990 — about the rise and fall of Irish-Italian criminal Henry Hill, from the 60s to the 80s — is a reminder of what his very best work looks like…GoodFellas barrels along with unstoppable storytelling relish, its jukebox slams of pop music repeatedly convulsing the movie with sugar-rush excitement amounting almost to hysteria.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

For its swaggering energy, the heart-in-your-throat pacing and for some of the most memorable, most imitated scenes in mafia movie history, this must rank as one of Scorsese’s finest films, if not the best.

Wendy Ide, The Observer

Media Partner