Scorsese effortlessly fuses top-drawer acting, pumping narrative drive and blitzkrieg camera technique to deliver a giddy, claustrophobic classic.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 30, 2024

Martin Scorsese perfects a configuration of the biopic as self-recognized fiction.

| Dec 12, 2023

The brutality of Raging Bull is intense, a mood Scorsese maintains consistently. And, connected with that, is the director's search for, if not beauty, then poetry, within that vivid viciousness. He succeeds in that search.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 11, 2023

De Niro playing La Motta in Raging Bull is beyond mere typecasting. It is an apotheosis. With La Motta as technical adviser, De Niro, an actor with a passion for authenticity, has found the ideal outlet for his singular talent.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 11, 2023

An intensely personal piece of work made to exacting specifications by a team of perfectionists. The result is like the man it portrays -- undeniably powerful and distinctive but not especially pleasant, an inspirer of awe but not affection.

| Oct 11, 2023

Even if Scorsese and De Niro have created a movie that defies categories, the sports film will never seem quite the same, and the boxing division has a new heavyweight against which past and future efforts will be measured.

| Oct 11, 2023

You certainly don't emerge from this entertainment uplifted, inspired or wishing to emulate a hero. Instead you've had your nose rubbed in the bloody, seamy side of the "manly act" and got to know one of its best, but least happy, champions.

| Oct 11, 2023

There is appalling violence in Raging Bull, but as in Greek tragedy the violence is the thunderbolt of shock of a total apprehension of the humanity of its characters.

| Oct 11, 2023

Between them, De Niro and Scorsese and their associates end up with a breathtakingly new dimension of memory and regret. If only I could feel the slightest moral resonance as well -- but I can't, and that makes all the difference.

| Oct 11, 2023

The impacted hell of city life, the incessant noise and motion, seen and heard as it washes over and around one man, is bearable only because Scorsese makes it beautiful. Almost overbearingly beautiful, but not quite.

| Oct 11, 2023

Seeing Martin Scorsese's new film is like visiting a human zoo... The life we watch is stripped to elemental drives, with just enough décor of complexity to underscore how elemental it basically is.

| Oct 11, 2023

Raging Bull is a modern epic in that it is ambitious and audacious -- an experimental film that plays with time, with a person's life and with a message... Scorsese has created a work that's at once appealing and appalling.

| Oct 11, 2023

It is above all a personal expression that takes its place in a body of work -- Scorsese's -- that has begun to have the size and coherence of a major novelist's.

| Oct 11, 2023

Raging Bull may prove to be Scorsese's finest achievement to date. Certainly the visceral intelligence on display, the radical awareness and use of his own cinephilia... make it a powerful contender.

| Oct 11, 2023

If you like a movie down-and-dirty, Raging Bull is it. Filmed in black-and-white, and shockingly well acted by De Niro, Raging Bull suggests that if you are looking for the source of evil in the world, you don't have to look any further than yourself.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 10, 2023

Extraordinary, electric, perverse, brilliant -- they are puny words to describe Robert De Niro in this unflinching biography of Jake La Motta.

| Oct 10, 2023

The enigma of La Motta remains and we are unenlightened... There is small point to the film beyond providing a showcase for the great gifts of De Niro and Scorsese's special talents. Are these enough?

| Oct 10, 2023

What is most remarkable about the new rigour of Raging Bull is that it tells La Motta's story with both complete realism and total subjectivity. In a way that leaves them difficult to disentangle... each is even made to seem a function of the other.

| Oct 10, 2023

Raging Bull feels like a tragedy, all right, but it's hollow at the center. I can't imagine anyone's seeing it without being awed; I also can't imagine anyone's really cherishing it.

| Oct 10, 2023

Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is a technically brilliant piece of moviemaking that is often spellbinding. Something, however, is desperately missing, and that's a story with interesting people.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 10, 2023