All of the performances are first-rate; Pesci stands out, though, with his seemingly unscripted manner. GoodFellas is easily one of the year`s best films.
This is Scorsese at the very height of his powers, orchestrating storytelling with a dynamic urgency and a bravura use of camera, music and outstanding performers.
One remains detached from the characters, but Scorsese succeeds in smashing all the foolishly romantic myths about the mob with this shocking, vigorously honest portrait of a slick yuppie gangster who couldn't stand being "an average nobody."
Goodfellas is a terrifying film because, like much of Scorsese's best work, it is about the lives of avuncular psychopaths, and pretty-boy Liotta brilliantly encapsulates that fetid contradiction.
In GoodFellas, Scorsese, that connoisseur of mean streets and brutish, reflexive rage, has fashioned a stunning film that belongs on the same lonely, top shelf as Coppola's Mafia saga.
For its swaggering energy, the heart-in-your-throat pacing and for some of the most memorable, most imitated scenes in mafia movie history, this must rank as one of Scorsese's finest films, if not the best.
GoodFellas, which somehow mixes its horrors with a deep vein of mordant humor, flows with the exuberance of a filmmaker who has every detail nailed and a few new lovely moves he wants to show us.
Spanning thirty years and running two and a half hours, the film bristles with the violent passion, howitzer wit and virtuoso style that made Scorsese's reputation with the gangster drama Mean Streets in 1973.
