Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas is both a wildly entertaining gangster movie and a sobering cautionary tale warning against a life of crime.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Feb 28, 2025

All I take out of Goodfellas narratively is an unpleasant experience with unpleasant people, and that’s it ... I don’t like or care about any character.

| Nov 21, 2024

Succinct filmmaking, satisfying performances and memorable dialogue assures Goodfellas position as a classic in the genre and Hollywood.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 14, 2024

Goodfellas excels in detailing the protagonist's journey within the mob, with narration that enriches rather than detracts. Despite a slower final act, it remains gripping.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2024

Goodfellas captures the pulse of gangster life, not just to understand what motivates these people and how they compartmentalize their choices, but to supply the audience with a shock treatment of aversion.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 26, 2024

It aged perfectly, even though many imitations have emerged in the last 33 years. In dealing with shades of grey, detestable but relatable characters, brutal violence and themes of family, friendship and crime, it feels timeless. Full review in Spanish.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 12, 2023

It's staggering: a feast of virtuoso Steadicam tracking shots, ironically pell-mell editing, and a mix of baroque visual satire, off-key realism, and brilliant, scabrous dialogue that elevates gutter badinage to the high verbal style of a Jacobean drama.

| Oct 18, 2023

The only argument you’re bound to get into concerning Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas is the degree of its greatness -- if it’s the most brilliant cinematic tour de force of the decade or merely this year. After 10 minutes I felt I had already seen 25 films.

| Oct 18, 2023

Scorsese constantly reveals the skull behind the smile. Seldom has violence been portrayed less glamorously or with more moral effectiveness.

| Oct 18, 2023

It is intimately personal, yet so removed as to remain nonjudgmental, and therefore totally trustworthy. We give into it without reservation, because its maker assures us with every shot, every move that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 18, 2023

GoodFellas, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, and directed by Scorsese, is the greatest film ever made about the sensual and monetary lure of crime, and the whole perversely brilliant movie comes into focus in a single, staggering shot.

| Oct 18, 2023

Like everything Scorsese makes, it is crisp and clean, with exciting cinematography and superior acting. Despite its length, it is fast-moving and gripping. I walked away emotionally drained from more than two hours of tension.

| Oct 18, 2023

We're taken in at our own risk, hooked on the film's speed, the power of its sights and sounds. Our nerve endings occasionally scream caveats... But we never doubt that a master at the top of his game is calling the shots.

| Oct 18, 2023

All that's on the screen is a showy, humorless vaunting of directorial technique, and misplaced technique at that. Scorsese sets up the material as comedy, but he seems to consider it beneath him to let viewers find any of it funny.

| Oct 18, 2023

Funny and frightening, unpredictable and provocative, GoodFellas may be the most authentic Mafia picture ever made. The acting is superb, and so natural that no one -- least of all De Niro -- seems to be performing.

| Oct 18, 2023

This working stiff's version of The Godfather is disappointing: It lacks depth and point of view, and a rich, sustained tone. The skin-deep style is voluptuous... But all that holds the story together is the parade of investigative revelations.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 18, 2023

In a fall that promises four gangster films, GoodFellas bursts out of the gate like a derby-winning filly.

| Original Score: A | Oct 18, 2023

The simple fact, as exhilarating as it is dreadful, is that after a life of crime, Hill had but one regret -- that he had to stop. This is the engine of GoodFellas, an idea as elemental as it is radical.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 18, 2023

Scorsese's GoodFellas is an unparalleled achievement, the most chilling and savagely droll account of mob life ever recorded on film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 18, 2023

The audience at GoodFellas spends a good deal of the movie exhilarated and laughing. It's a very funny movie, but most of the laughs are turned back on the audience. You don't get away with it.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 18, 2023