Goodfellas (1990)
“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” Henry Hill’s voiceover hits like a Tommy gun burst, and Scorsese never lets up. Ray Liotta’s wide-eyed climb from Brooklyn errand boy to Lufthansa-heist prince is pure adrenaline—cocaine montages cut to the Stones, bodies buried in backyards while mom’s sauce simmers.
De Niro’s Jimmy Conway? Cool as a freezer full of corpses. Pesci’s Tommy DeVito? A live wire in a silk shirt—“Funny how?” still makes waiters flinch. Lorraine Bracco’s Karen snorts the glamour, then the paranoia, her “I’m not a gangster’s wife” meltdown a razor in the ribs. The Copacabana tracking shot? One take, one night, one legend.
From the “shinebox” beatdown to the helicopter paranoia spiral, every frame crackles—freeze-frame punchlines, voiceover overlaps, blood on the jukebox. Ends in witness-protection suburbia with Henry in a bathrobe, whining about egg noodles and ketchup. The American Dream, mob-style: fast, funny, and fatal. Still the greatest wiseguy symphony ever shot.
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