Goodfellas | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

It's staggering: a feast of virtuoso Steadicam tracking shots, ironically pell-mell editing, and a mix of baroque visual satire, off-key realism, and brilliant, scabrous dialogue that elevates gutter badinage to the high verbal style of a Jacobean drama.

The only argument you’re bound to get into concerning Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas is the degree of its greatness -- if it’s the most brilliant cinematic tour de force of the decade or merely this year. After 10 minutes I felt I had already seen 25 films.

Scorsese constantly reveals the skull behind the smile. Seldom has violence been portrayed less glamorously or with more moral effectiveness.

It is intimately personal, yet so removed as to remain nonjudgmental, and therefore totally trustworthy. We give into it without reservation, because its maker assures us with every shot, every move that he knows exactly what he’s doing.

GoodFellas, written by Nicholas Pileggi and Martin Scorsese, and directed by Scorsese, is the greatest film ever made about the sensual and monetary lure of crime, and the whole perversely brilliant movie comes into focus in a single, staggering shot.