Goodfellas Review

Scorsese builds the whole film on velocity. Narration steps over dialogue, freeze frames interrupt scenes to render a memory, and Thelma Schoonmaker cuts so fast that thirty years pass without the audience checking a watch. The Copacabana Steadicam shot is famous for the wrong reason: it is not showing off, it is an argument, three minutes of doors opening and tables appearing to explain exactly what Karen is falling for. Joe Pesci turns a bar anecdote into genuine terror in the funny-how routine, and Ray Liotta's grin does the dirtiest work in the film by making complicity look like fun.

Then the last act inverts the method. The Sunday of helicopters and ziti is shot in the same style, but the style now reads as amphetamine panic, so the audience feels the crash physically. Michael Ballhaus lights the early scenes warm and the late ones flat and cold. If anything keeps it out of the top tier it is that Karen's interiority thins once the paranoia takes over. Everything else is technique in service of a moral.