Release Year: 1990

Genre: Biography, Crime, Drama

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writers: Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese

Stars: Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta

When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? A doctor? A space cowboy? Taylor Swift?

Henry Hill always wanted to be a gangster.

Goodfellas (a.k.a. GoodFellas), which charged into cinemas on September 19, 1990, charts Henry's meteoric rise and spectacular fall in the mafia underworld. The American Film Institute ranks it as the second-best gangster film of all time.

Yep, it beat Scarface.

Goodfellas, which is based on a true story, was directed by Martin Scorsese, the Oscar-winning filmmaker who knows a thing or two about crime dramas. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Departed, The Wolf of Wall Street: all Scorsese joints.

On the other side of the camera, Goodfellas' cast is a murderer's row of acting heavyweights, each at the top of their respective games: Robert De Niro. Joe Pesci. Ray Liotta. Lorraine Bracco. Yeah, this gritty New York mob story isn't messing around.

At least, not with its cast.

In fact, many of the film's extras were honest-to-goodness gangsters. Asked for their Social Security numbers so they could get paid, "the wiseguys said, '1, 2, 6, uh, 6, 7, 8, uh, 4, 3, 2, 1, 7, 8' … They just kept reciting numbers until they were over," recalls Nicholas Pileggi, the crime reporter-turned screenwriter who penned the film with Scorsese. "Nobody ever figured out where that money went or who cashed the checks" (source). Bottom line: Goodfellas' look at the shady, street-level dealings of the mafia is as authentic as it gets.

And Goodfellas doesn't pull any punches in its violent portrayal of modern mob life. "The movie sort of grabs you by the throat from the very beginning and doesn't let you go for two and a half hours," explains Moviefone's Gary Susman (source). Unsurprisingly, Goodfellas' visceral style was a tough pill for some film fans to swallow. So tough that plenty of 'em walked right out of the theaters.

But savvy critics dug Goodfellas from the jump, and they got average Joe and Jane Moviegoer on board. Goodfellas would go on to gross $46,836,214 domestically and scoop up six Oscar nominations and one win—for Pesci, who, ironically, plays the film's most violent wiseguy by far.

Goodfellas' lasting legacy lies in its insider approach to portraying three decades in a mafia family. It's both intimate and larger than life. "Most films, even great ones, evaporate like mist once you've returned to the real world," Roger Ebert writes in his Goodfellas review. "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" (source).

And since we like to have the last word—even when we're up against Roger Ebert—we just want to leave you with one of warning:

Don't bring the kids.

Goodfellas isn't your mama's mob movie.

While other mafia flicks present a sweeping, romanticized view of life in "the family," Goodfellas keeps it real and takes it to the bloody, ruthless streets. By stripping the mafia lifestyle of its traditional Sicilian, The Godfather-esque splendor, Goodfellas shows how straight-up scary it is to be a wiseguy. As David Sims of The Atlantic put it, the film "upended every concept of nobility and honor in organized crime. […] It never cops the posture of something Important" (source). It's different because of "its authentic sense of real lives being lived," writes Joe McGovern of Entertainment Weekly (source).

But, it's not just that.

In a mob film genre that's bursting at the seams, Goodfellas is the only one that's about what it feels like to be in the mafia. The emphasis isn't on plot, which is a series of disconnected events and jumps back and forth; it's on one mobster's experience—which, by the way, was taken straight from a biography about him.

Via voice-over, we see 30 years of that life through Henry's slightly bloodshot eyes, and we get to feel the rush he gets from the power and luxury that the life provides. The famous tracking shot of him wining and dining Karen at an exclusive table at the Copacabana clues us in to what it felt like for a 21-year-old guy to be treated like royalty in front of his girl—just what he dreamed it would feel like when he was a kid. We see his excitement about the heists, his sense of superiority to ordinary law-abiding mortals, and his surprise at how his more, um, temperamental companions would just as soon shoot someone as look at 'em.

Henry's American Dream eventually turns into an American nightmare, and we get up close and personal with him as his life comes crashing down around him. Roger Ebert again:

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. (Source)

The scene is as fast paced and chaotic as Hill's state of mind, which on that day is a cocaine-powered cocktail of paranoia and panic.

One last thing: Goodfellas invented the talkative gangster. You'll find no "strong and silent" types here. The mobsters in Goodfellas can't shut up—least of all Henry, our protagonist who narrates the film in diligent detail. As a character, Henry set a standard for decades of verbose big-screen bad guys to come. Try The Sopranos or virtually any of director Quentin Tarantino's films, and you'll see what we mean.

You're welcome in advance.