Goodfellas 4K UHD – Frank Sivero, Paul Sorvino

Martin Scorsese’s violent, true-life gangster epic which follows Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) as he rises through the ranks of the Mafia. Upon turning FBI informant to help pay for his drug addiction, Hill recalls how he got started in the Mob following the $6 million robbery of a Lufthansa cargo at a New York airport. Hill and his partners, Jimmy Conway (Robert De Niro) and Tommy De Vito (Joe Pesci), went on to rise through the ranks of the Mafia over three decades, eventually eliminating Paul Cicero (Paul Sorvino), the neighbourhood godfather who originally took Hill under his wing. Joe Pesci won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Martin Scorsese’s 1990 masterpiece GoodFellas immortalises the hilarious, horrifying life of actual gangster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), from his teen years on the streets of New York to his anonymous exile under the Witness Protection Program. The director’s kinetic style is perfect for recounting Hill’s ruthless rise to power in the 1950s as well as his drugged-out fall in the late 1970s; in fact, no one has ever rendered the mental dislocation of cocaine better than Scorsese. Scorsese uses period music perfectly, not just to summon a particular time but to set a precise mood. GoodFellas is at least as good as The Godfather without being in the least derivative of it. Joe Pesci’s psycho improvisation of Mobster Tommy DeVito ignited Pesci as a star, Lorraine Bracco scores the performance of her life as the love of Hill’s life, and every supporting role, from Paul Sorvino to Robert De Niro, is a miracle.