GoodFellas

A crime film in New York spread across thirty years. Henry watches the men across the street as a child. He leaves school to work for them, and the first line of the film explains why. From there the film is a rise. Cigarette smuggling, hijacked lorries, a nightclub, a wedding, a robbery at an airport. There are two partners. Jimmy plans, and Tommy is the one who can go off at any moment. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but belonging: Henry chooses that life not for money but to sit at the best table, and the film makes the first half of it very attractive. Then it comes apart. After the robbery everyone who asks for a share disappears one at a time, and in the middle of the film the threat comes entirely from inside. Karen's narration comes in and the story becomes two-voiced, which is not the genre's habit. The last section compresses into a single day. Cocaine, a helicopter, a meal to cook, and an edit that keeps accelerating; the sequence is the most discussed thing in it. The walk into the nightclub through the back entrance was done in one unbroken shot, the most economical way to say what the place was worth. The tension in the restaurant scene was not in the script. It came out of something Joe Pesci had really seen, and the actor opposite him was not told where the scene would go. The source is a book by Nicholas Pileggi; the man it is about was real and entered witness protection. Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino are in the cast. Pesci won an Academy Award for the part. Martin Scorsese directed. Who it is for: anyone who wants one of the best examples of the genre. Who it is not for: anyone looking for sympathy; nobody here is good and the violence is sudden and unadorned.