"Vinney don't put too many onions in the sauce"

Rating: 10/10 (16 January 2011)

After sitting down and re watching the heavyweights of the Scorsese library, a few things can be said. Taxi Driver is overrated. Raging Bull is humble and beautiful, but frankly, boring. And Goodfellas? It holds up like the pyramids. In 2010 the movie is just as powerful, just as mesmerizing and just as shocking as the first time I saw it in 1994. Few films hold their power after so many years and so many repeated viewings. But this film does and then some.
I don't think there's ever been a movie with an opening so shocking and absorbing. Something goes bump in the night and a lonely drive down an empty road transitions into a bloody nightmare. From here on out, you're hooked like a crack junkie.
Scorsese is firing on all cylinders here. Where many of his films have touched greatness in one form or another, he never before, nor since, reached the perfection of Goodfellas. Like Paulie slicing the garlic with a razor blade, so too are each of the story's ingredients added. Every performance, every camera move, every edit is perfect. They all mix for a true masterpiece. There is not one onion too many in this sauce. To call this a gangster film, is to do it injustice. Goodfellas is more than that. The Godfather is like Shakespeare. That's cool. But Goodfellas is simply Biblical and in a class of its own.
There is a powerful sense of vision at work here. Goodfellas is one of the best edited, best acted, best directed, best photographed and most entertaining films you will ever see.