Fans who haven’t watched director Martin Scorsese’s must-see gangster movie can find out why Ray Liotta’s character, Henry Hill, “always wanted to be a gangster” when Goodfellas drops on Paramount+ Friday, November 1. Not only does the Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci-led flick rightfully register an impressive 95% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer, but Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect four-star rating. In the late movie critic’s enamoring review, the Chicago Sun-Times journalist wrote about how Goodfellas stuck with him for days after having seen the picture. The Pulitzer Prize winner wrote (per RogerEbert.com):
“For two days after I saw Martin Scorsese’s new film, GoodFellas, the mood of the characters lingered within me, refusing to leave. It was a mood of guilt and regret, of quick stupid decisions leading to wasted lifetimes, of loyalty turned into betrayal. Yet at the same time there was an element of furtive nostalgia, for bad times that shouldn’t be missed, but were.”
Ebert, who is probably most well-known for starring with Gene Siskel on the film review television series At the Movies, continued his review of Goodfellas by saying:
“Most films, even great ones, evaporate like mist once you’ve returned to the real world; they leave memories behind, but their reality fades fairly quickly. Not this film, which shows America’s finest filmmaker at the peak of his form. No finer film has ever been made about organized crime — not even The Godfather, although the two works are not really comparable.”
Roger Ebert Praises Martin Scorsese’s Work on Goodfellas
Cinephiles won’t ever find director Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas ranked among Roger Ebert’s most scathing reviews. In fact, Ebert goes on in his critique of the 1990 film to pronounce that Scorsese was “the only director” worthy of adapting author Nicholas Pileggi’s 1985 book of non-fiction, Wiseguy, for the Silver Screen. Ebert wrote in the same review:
“Scorsese is the right director – the only director – for this material. He knows it inside out. The great formative experience of his life was growing up in New York’s Little Italy as an outsider who observed everything – an asthmatic kid who couldn’t play sports, whose health was too bad to allow him to lead a normal childhood, who was often overlooked, but never missed a thing.”
Ebert continued praising Scorsese’s cinematic mastery of Goodfellas, even comparing the gangster movie to some of the Oscar-winner’s (Best Director | The Departed) most beloved on-screen work, including his dramatic boxing masterpiece, Raging Bull. Ebert wrote in his critique:
“In all of his work, which has included arguably the best film of the 1970s (Taxi Driver) and of the 1980s (Raging Bull), Scorsese has never done a more compelling job of getting inside someone’s head as he does in one of the concluding passages of GoodFellas, in which he follows one day in the life of Henry Hill, as he tries to do a cocaine deal, cook dinner for his family, placate his mistress and deal with the suspicion that he’s being followed.”
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For those who can’t wait for one of the best gangster movies ever made to drop on Paramount+, Ray Liotta, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci’s epic, criminally cool team-up is now available to stream on Max.It’s worth noting that Pesci walked away with the only Academy Award (Best Actor in a Supporting Role) for Goodfellas at the 1991 Oscar ceremony — a film which was nominated for a total of six golden statues.