Along with the recent Oscar winner "The Departed", Scorsese has given us 2 great gangster thrillers along with his seminal "Mean Streets". Ray Liotta will probably never have a greater role than this since he has since fallen into doing B-movies or straight to video features. And Joe Pesci's Oscar performance as a psycho hood ranks up there with the best of Cagney. A little long perhaps but filled with juicy details of the mob and of course, DeNiros excellent performance.

Martin Scorsese is one of my fav movie directors and Goodfellas is probably my favorite ganster movie (alongside with Godfather Part 1 and 2). Here De Niro delivers one of his best performances as an actor and this kind of character fit him so well. On Joe Pesci, this was the first time I saw him on a movie and I really did enjoy his impersonation as an "beyond good and evil" ganster. His "How Am I funny? Funny how?" Monolog it's one of the best twisted funny moments I have never saw on a movie. Finally, the brand new Ray Liotta as the main character and story teller is simply awesome. Later on he lost himself on some non trascendent movies. But anyway, Goodfellas is a hell of a kind movie. Five stars for sure!

I needed to watch this for a film class, so I just bought the cheapest version amazon had. In hindsight, I wish I'd spent a little more and gotten a decent DVD. This is a double-sided DVD, with the movie split in half over both sides. This means that if you're watching it in your living room, you'll have to get up and flip the disc over in the middle of the movie. In addition, it is not anamorphic widescreen, so on a widescreen tv it shows up as a little box in the center of the screen (though on a fullscreen it should be fine). Finally, it has no special features except for the trailers. If you plan on watching this film more than once, invest the extra bucks and get the newer edition.

Goodfellas is a good movie, destined to stamp its mark on the modern age. It is a sort of ersatz Godfather - tighter, easier, more accessible than the great Coppola Trilogy (or rather, parts I and II). Scorsese uses a fast paced, dialogue heavy, boiler plated filmic style to tell the story (based on the true one) of mob informer Henry Hill. Perhaps because he uses a real story as his base, it has an oddly lopsided narrative structure - the film ascends to a nasty and brilliant climax two thirds of the way through, culminating in the famous 'Layla' scene - the Jim Gordon piano the musical background to a number of 'whacked' bodies turning up all over town. But by the end the pace has fizzled a little, and the last third is fairly thin fare given the explosive might of what has gone before.

The film is gangster lite - the customs, routines, tropes, jargon are explained frequently by a rather intrusive voiceover. None of the dark roiling of the great gangster films - brutal killings with no explanation. Still, it is a great cast and the movie is brilliantly filmed. Liotta looks a little overwhelmed at the role he has landed, but De Niro is sublime, and Lorraine Bracco is beautiful, brash and vulnerable as Hill's no nonsense Jewish wife from the five towns.

Following the progress of gangster Ray Liotta and his relationship with mentors Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, Goodfellas is the kind of film you'll either think is a masterpiece or wonder what all the fuss was about. Performances are all outstanding, Scorsese's direction energetic and innovative, but somewhere around the halfway point you may wonder where it's going and come to the conclusion that great performances and grandstanding direction is all its about. There's no shortage of outstanding scenes but the film becomes increasingly repetitive as it underlines and escalates its variations on a theme until it feels like it's all style with nothing more underneath than a two-and-a-half hour episode of Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous.

Good extras on the two-disc version, but it's hard to buy into all the hype for the film.