The knockout blow of a lifetime

Rating: 10/10 (18 June 2001)

The stunning combination of Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro delivers the knockout blow of a lifetime. After two decades, the film's greatness endures.
Filmed in brooding black and white, but with devilishly clever color clips, Raging Bull is the perfect film noir. DeNiro, whose effect on the film reaches everything from writing to lighting, is the greatest film actor of all time, and this is his greatest hour. He brings an odd humanity to the most inhumane of all sports. He is vulnerable, yet stoic, confident, yet deeply self-doubting. He epitomizes the frailty of even the strongest among us. A most deserved Oscar can only begin to pay tribute to DeNiro, who collaborated in a rewrite to make the unctuous LaMotta more sympathetic, and then portrayed him with such sympathy and insight that we are constantly reminded that even the most unlikeable of people are still people.
Spanning 23 years, at once managing to be epic and intimate, Martin Scorsese's masterpiece is perfect in every way. Cinematogaphy rivaled only by the likes of Orson Welles or Francis Ford Coppola, who later directed DeNiro in the Godfather trilogy, a score both tragic and majestic, and oh the acting. Even Joe Pesci contributes an Oscar-worthy career performance as the brother of Jake LaMotta (DeNiro).
The fact that such films as Shawshank Redemption, Memento, Saving Private Ryan, L.A. Confidential, The Matrix, and Das Boot, all superb films in their own right, and It's a Wonderful Life and Toy Story 2, lightweight fodder at best, are ranked in this site higher than Raging Bull is ludicrous. Even the finest among them pale by comparison, and when they are two decades old, will be far less remembered, revered, and imitated, than this powerful, and perhaps most important, giant of the modern era.
If I could only have ten DVD's for the rest of my life, this would have to be one of them.