Goodfellas

Is it a great movie? I don't think so. But it's a triumphant piece of filmmaking-journalism presented with the brio of drama.

Anti-romantic, it nevertheless sweeps us into the allure of mob glamour -- then slams us with its cost of admission.

Scorsese's barely fictionalized adaptation of Hill's memoir captures the charge of being a mobster on New York in the sixties and seventies without glorifying the behavior by keying into Hill's willfully self-deluded perspective.

Robert De Niro is reliably dynamic, and Joe Pesci's portrait of a gangster with a sense of humour is hideously memorable, but there's no doubt that GoodFellas fights a losing battle against numbness.

The best movie about who gangsters are, and how they came to exert such a magnetic pull on American culture.