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

With all the talent in this movie, singling out a specific performer seems capricious, but let me take a stab at it. I will grant you that De Niro is perfection... But let me reserve my loudest applause for Pesci.

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

They are treated like lab specimens, clinically normal looking, yet mutated by some corrupt gene into social monsters we'd rather not claim as our next of kin. All that dissuades one from making an early exit is Scorsese's magisterial detachment.

| Oct 18, 2023

The authentic, obscene dialogue and Thelma Schoonmaker's highly-regarded editing combine to provide a dynamic that compensates for the absence of conventional dramatic development.

| Oct 18, 2023

Like any decent anthropologist, Scorsese does not impose judgments. The casual amorality of the wise guys may be disturbing, but the director's skill is to demonstrate convincingly the heady attractions of a life where money is everything.

| Oct 18, 2023

Like his finale to the tune of the Sid Vicious "I Did It May Way," Scorsese is trying a stylistic variation that's wired, joltingly different, but right.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Oct 18, 2023

There is a short, needling comedy of violence and cowardice somewhere inside this stylish film, and it is worth watching more than once to prise it free. Scorsese himself chickened out, I think: perhaps the Mob got to him after all.

| Oct 18, 2023

Aided by Nicholas Pileggi and by a cast who seem to know almost by instinct that this is no ordinary mafia melodrama, he has made a [film] that takes risks in style as well as content and brings off almost everything in the manner of a great filmmaker.

| Oct 18, 2023

The film provides a sobering breath of raw ammonia to a mass audience intoxicated on legends of [the Mafia]. After a compelling buildup of almost 80 minutes, however, GoodFellas lapses into a numbingly repetitive state for another hour.

| Original Score: 5/10 | Oct 18, 2023

Scorsese drags us through the scalding plot, co-scripted by him and Pileggi, without pausing once to bathe our foreheads in either easy comedy or facile moralising. He forces the filmgoer to implicate himself with the characters.

| Oct 18, 2023

Lingering somewhere at the bottom of GoodFellas is a hint of desperation on Scorsese's part... [He] seems to have scrabbled for this subject -- not fresh, even for him -- as if he needed a success; then, once he had decided, he started to justify it.

| Oct 18, 2023

How dull, safe and prosaic most Hollywood cinema appears after seeing the work of a virtuoso director like Martin Scorsese in full flight.

| Oct 17, 2023

Mr. Scorsese's juxtapositions of the extraordinary and the everyday result in a razor-edged balance of comedy and horror, affection and repulsion. Violence is frequent, treated as commonplace, and all the more disturbing for it.

| Oct 17, 2023

It slowly turns into The Movie That Wouldn't Stop... It's a shame that the film's disappointing second hour tends to obliterate some terrific performances.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Oct 17, 2023

“As far back as I can remember, I’ve always wanted to be gangster"... There’s your male fantasy right there, but it’s one that Scorsese’s film dismantles with brutal elegance, along with the brand of masculinity that subscribes to it.

| Oct 17, 2023

It’s all so gloriously pointless, and yet Scorsese makes the mobster’s life feel like that of a god among men. Liotta has probably never been better -- wormy and yet somehow sympathetic.

| Oct 17, 2023

It gives us some splendiferous pieces, but it leaves it to us to fit them into a thematically coherent puzzle. The effort is pure pleasure.

| Dec 7, 2022

Complex, volatile, ironic and disquieting, Scorsese's Goodfellas is a masterly achievement in intense observation.

| Sep 19, 2019