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One of the movies that defined American cinema of the 1970s, Mean Streets helped pave the way for independent filmmaking as we know it today. Martin Scorsese's 1973 release proved that there was an audience for realistic, character-driven films built around dark, complex characters. It is also the film that teamed Martin Scorsese, Harvey Keitel, and Robert De Niro for the first time. Set within the gritty milieu of New York's Little Italy, where the film was mostly shot, Mean Streets examines the strained friendship between two wiseguys, Charlie (Keitel) and Johnny Boy (De Niro). It's 1971, and their tight-knit community is also under strain as the world outside -- gays, blacks, drugs, Vietnam -- bears down on it. De Niro's portrayal of the volatile Johnny Boy made him a star, but it is Keitel's performance -- one of the finest of his career -- that carries the film. As an aspiring priest turned mobster, Keitel movingly conveys Charlie's conflicted Catholicism as he struggles to save his self-destructive buddy. Stripped down and brutal, this is nevertheless a beautiful, at times poetic, film that remains one of Scorsese's most personal works -- and one of his best. Andreas Killen
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For those who felt that the Godfather movies presented too idealized a view of the Mafia, Martin Scorsese's maniacally fast-paced, violent, and funny epic is a bracing antidote; Goodfellas reveals, in unstinting detail, the mob's amoral savagery. Based on Nicholas Pileggi's bestselling book Wiseguy, the film chronicles the doomed career of mobster-turned-FBI-informant Henry Hill. Growing up, he idolized the high-living Mafia goons he saw in his Brooklyn neighborhood and eventually became a member of their "family," though he was only half Sicilian. Largely eschewing conventional narrative, Scorsese adopts an episodic structure that allows him to concentrate on specifics of character and milieu. All of the acting -- from Ray Liotta's dazzling star turn as the cocaine-addled Hill to Joe Pesci's terrifying, Oscar-winning portrayal of a psychotic gangster -- is spectacular. And, as in Mean Streets, Scorsese uses pop music like no other director, brilliantly establishing the mood and period, which spans from the 1950s to the early 1980s. Nominated for six Academy Awards, Goodfellas stands as one of the great modern gangster films. Kryssa Schemmerling
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With one of the 20th century’s most colorful characters as his subject, director Martin Scorsese has turned out an unusually compelling biography that, like many of its kind, generates tremendous interest while ignoring or distorting portions of the historical record. Scorsese’s portrait of maverick tycoon/filmmaker/aviator Howard Hughes (played convincingly by a seemingly miscast Leonardo DiCaprio) is accurate in a “big picture” sense, even to its unstated but strongly implied attribution of Hughes’s legendary eccentricities to an undiagnosed case of what we know today as obsessive-compulsive disorder. And it certainly presents thrilling re-creations of his aerial adventures, which included setting a new airspeed record in 1935, crashing an experimental spy plane in 1946, and getting his mammoth flying boat -- derisively nicknamed “the Spruce Goose” -- airborne in 1947. But the film plays fast and loose with many other aspects of Hughes’s amazing life; for example, it completely ignores his ill-fated first marriage, which was well underway during the three-year production of Hell’s Angels dramatized in Aviator’s first act. It also disregards his torrid affair with then-famous actress Billie Dove and overlooks his lengthy, close friendship with actor Cary Grant. Still, Scorsese does a magnificent job of depicting the wild-and-woolly Hollywood of the late silent and early sound years, vividly recreating the bacchanalian atmosphere of such famous nightspots as the Coconut Grove. Hughes’s lengthy and improbable romance with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett in an Oscar-winning performance) gets expansive treatment, as does his on-again, off-again fling with glamorous Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). Critics and viewers caught up in the Hollywood sections of the film were less impressed with its last hour, in which a clearly disturbed Hughes, his mental illness exacerbated by head injuries sustained in the 1946 crash, fights for both his sanity and his business. But the tycoon’s memorable showdown with Senator Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), the culmination of Senate hearings called to investigate mismanagement of government funds by Hughes Aircraft during World War II, is a bravura climax that showcases The Aviator’s exceptional writing, directing, acting, and editing. Nearly three hours in length, the film has a few tedious stretches, but Scorsese achieves the heights he's aiming for -- a truly soaring cinematic experience. Ed Hulse
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This Americanized remake of a highly acclaimed Chinese thriller, Infernal Affairs was welcomed as a return to form for director Martin Scorsese. The Departed takes place in Boston, where Irish Mafia kingpin Frank Costello (a superb Jack Nicholson) rules the local underworld with an iron hand while terrifying law-abiding citizens. Costello plants a carefully groomed “mole,” Colin Sullivan (Matt Damon), in the local police department. Unbeknownst to either of them, the department has placed its own mole, Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio), in Costello’s gang. It’s only a matter of time before both moles are suspected and put in grave danger. Under Scorsese’s direction, the intriguing plot generates nearly unbearable suspense, which is periodically interrupted with staccato bursts of savage violence, flamboyantly staged for jarring effect. There’s additional tension in a subplot that finds Sullivan’s therapist girlfriend (Vera Farmiga) attracted to one of her ex-patients, the increasingly nervous Costigan. The principals all turn in sensational performances, as do the film’s key supporting players: Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, Ray Winstone, and Academy Award nominee Mark Wahlberg. Nobody has ever gotten into the heads of mobsters quite as well as Scorsese, and in this complex, multilayered story, he’s finally found the perfect vehicle for his incomparable talents. Ed Hulse
All Movie Guide
Legendary director Martin Scorsese takes the helm for this tale of questionable loyalties and blurring identities set in the South Boston organized crime scene and inspired by the wildly popular 2002 Hong Kong crime film Infernal Affairs. As the police force attempts to reign in the increasingly powerful Irish mafia, authorities are faced with the prospect of sending in an undercover agent or seeing their already frail grip on the criminal underworld slip even further. Billy Costigan (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a young cop looking to make a name for himself in the world of law enforcement. Collin Sullivan (Matt Damon) is a street-smart criminal who has successfully infiltrated the police department with the sole intention of reporting their every move to ruthless syndicate head Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson). When Costigan is assigned the task of working his way into Costello's tightly guarded inner circle, Sullivan is faced with the responsibility of rooting out the informer before things get out of hand. With the stakes constantly rising and time quickly running out for the undercover cop and his criminal counterpart, each man must work feverishly to reveal his counterpart before his identity is exposed by the other. Martin Sheen, Alec Baldwin, and Ray Winstone co-star, and writer William Monahan adapts a screenplay originally penned by Alan Mak and Felix Chong. Jason Buchanan
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Martin Scorsese directed this fast-moving, epic-scale biopic documenting the life and loves one of the most colorful Americans of the 20th century, Howard Hughes. The Aviator follows Hughes (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) as the twentysomething millionaire, having already made a fortune improving the design of oil-drilling bits, comes to Hollywood with an interest in getting into the picture business. It doesn't take long for Hughes, with his passion for airplanes, to jump from producer to director of his first major film project, a World War I air epic called Hell's Angels, which took three years to complete thanks to the shift from silent to sound filming and Hughes' relentless perfectionism. However, the film was a massive hit, and the eccentric inventor became a mogul in Hollywood, making Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) a star and enjoying a romance with Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett). But Hollywood's old-boy network never fully accepted Hughes, and in time his passion for flying began to reclaim his attentions as he began designing new planes, setting air speed records, flying around the world, and risking his life testing aircraft. Hughes also found time to romance Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale) and founded his own airline, Trans-World Airlines, though as his ideas became bolder, his approach became more eccentric, and he gained many powerful enemies, including the head of Pan-American Airlines, Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), and Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda), who attempted to prove that Hughes' radical design ideas were actually part of an effort to bilk taxpayers for millions of dollars through government contracts. The Aviator's star-studded cast also includes John C. Reilly, Jude Law, Willem Dafoe, Ian Holm, and Frances Conroy. Mark Deming
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Martin Scorsese explores the life of organized crime with his gritty, kinetic adaptation of Nicolas Pileggi's best-selling Wiseguy, the true-life account of mobster and FBI informant Henry Hill. Set to a true-to-period rock soundtrack, the story details the rise and fall of Hill, a half-Irish, half-Sicilian New York kid who grows up idolizing the "wise guys" in his impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood. He begins hanging around the mobsters, running errands and doing odd jobs until he gains the notice of local chieftain Paulie Cicero (Paul Sorvino), who takes him in as a surrogate son. As he reaches his teens, Hill (Ray Liotta) is inducted into the world of petty crime, where he distinguishes himself as a "stand-up guy" by choosing jail time over ratting on his accomplices. From that moment on, he is a part of the family. Along with his psychotic partner Tommy (Joe Pesci), he rises through the ranks to become Paulie's lieutenant; however, he quickly learns that, like his mentor Jimmy (Robert DeNiro), his ethnicity prevents him from ever becoming a "made guy," an actual member of the crime family. Soon he finds himself the target of both the feds and the mobsters, who feel that he has become a threat to their security with his reckless dealings. Goodfellas was rewarded with six Academy Award nominations including Best Picture; Pesci would walk away with Best Supporting Actor for his work. Jeremy Beday
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"You don't make up for your sins in church; you do it in the streets; you do it at home. The rest is bulls--t, and you know it." Returning to the autobiographical milieu of his 1968 debut Who's That Knocking at My Door? for his third feature, Martin Scorsese examined the daily struggles of a wannabe hood to keep his morals straight on the streets of Little Italy. Driven equally by his wish to become a respectable gangster like his uncle (Cesare Danova) and his desire to live his life like St. Francis, Charlie (Harvey Keitel) takes on his energetically unhinged friend Johnny Boy (Robert De Niro) as his own personal penance, intervening to get Johnny Boy to pay off a debt to the local loan shark Michael (Richard Romanus). Despite his promises to his epileptic girlfriend Teresa (Amy Robinson) that they will move out of Little Italy once he strengthens his position in his uncle's world, Charlie's involvement with Johnny Boy further ensnares him in the neighborhood. When Johnny Boy decides to mouth off to Michael rather than pay him, Charlie, Johnny Boy, and Teresa try to flee Michael's murderous anger (and an assassin played by Scorsese), forcing Charlie to realize that the rules of the streets do not mesh with absolution. Whereas fellow "film school generation" director Francis Ford Coppola transformed the Hollywood gangster movie into metaphorical epics about the Mafia and capitalism in The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Scorsese revised the genre in the opposite direction, focusing on the gritty minutiae of daily life and drawing from personal memory. Combining documentary-style realism (even though most of the film was shot in L.A.); kinetic editing and camera movement; and expressionistic lighting, angles, and film speed, Scorsese presents an intimate picture of the trivial incidents and latent violence of Charlie's and Johnny Boy's world, naturalistically unfolding their experiences rather than simply explaining what motivates them. They lead a claustrophobic, petty existence that Scorsese and screenwriter Mardik Martin witnessed growing up in Little Italy, complete with a soundtrack of hit songs like "Be My Baby" and "Jumping Jack Flash" that had poured out of neighborhood radios. Mean Streets opened at the New York Film Festival to excellent notices and played strongly in New York but failed to duplicate that level of business elsewhere. Even so, Mean Streets established Scorsese and De Niro as formidable young talents and marked the beginning of a long-running and fertile collaboration that continued in such films as Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), and Goodfellas (1990). Scorsese's exceptional grasp of the texture of day-to-day life, the rhythm and cadences of street talk, and cinema's visual and aural possibilities makes Mean Streets one of the pivotal films of the 1970s, as well as of Scorsese's career, and an influence on such future filmmakers as Spike Lee and Quentin Tarantino, among many others. Lucia Bozzola
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