The Movie Forums Top 100 of All-Time Refresh: Countdown

You can technically ask "what's the big deal?" about any film, for sure, but I think it's reasonable with Goodfellas because the love for it here seems to consistently outstrip its love in other places. On both incarnations of the AFI list, for example, it was near the very bottom.

By that argument so were Pulp Fiction and Blade Runner. Raiders of the Lost Ark was #66 on the second AFI List.

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Very true. And I'd be okay with people asking that, too! The answers might be instructive. Of the three I only like Pulp Fiction as much as most people, caveating that it's difficult to quantify "most."

I didn't include Goodfella's on my top 25, not because I don't think it is a deserving movie (even though I much prefer the two Scorsese's I chose), but because of the brainiac reason that I just don't trust how enjoyable it is to watch. The level of fun it induces seems incongruent with the subject matter for me. But it's a pretty phenomenal piece of filmmaking regardless.

Yeah, I've kind of been at a loss to explain why I don't love Goodfellas more. My best explanation is that it suffers from a dominated strategy: it's a very good mob film, but that means I'll always think of better mob films when it comes up. Even just among Marty's filmography, I prefer Casino, which strikes the right kind of tragic tone that you alluded to.

Liotta's character always felt kind of one-dimensional to me, too.

I see no harm in asking, and people offering their reasoning for loving X or Y film. Then again, that's pretty much what most of us have been doing every time a new film is announced on the list, so I suppose we're jumping ahead of that discussion.

Anyway, for what it's worth, Goodfellas was pretty much universally praised at RT and Corrie.

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Yeah, that's another thing, it's hard enough to parse preferences, let alone super subtle ones like "why do people here think this is REALLY great instead of just great?"

My best general guess for most of these types of things would be that the voting members here are mostly male, mostly American, and mostly between the ages of say twenty and fifty.

But that is simply your taste. I do not think there is a better mob movie than GoodFellas. I would bet most of the others who voted for it highly on their ballots feel the same. Or if they have The Godfather a spot or two higher, it's damn close, anyway. But it's not third or tenth or the fiftieth best for many people, certainly not the voters here. Also to reduce it to its most basic plot description as being "a mob movie" misses the bravura filmmaking by Scorsese, which especially among film buffs/nerds counts for a whole lot.

But I mostly think if somebody thinks films x and z "feel" like classics while films y and b are merely good-to-great but not "classic", that is nothing but taste.

Thanks for all these responses! As I stated, I actually do love Goodfellas and watch it any time I see it's on TV somewhere. But, like Yoda mentioned, I do prefer Casino to Goodfellas, even if Goodfellas is (theoretically) more based on actual events. I loved Sharon Stone's performance in Casino, which totally makes that movie veer into the excellent category for me. I didn't think any of the performances in Goodfellas come close to rivaling the ones in Casino.

But the crazy tension that escalates in Goodfellas makes it worth many rewatches for me. When Karen decides not to go look at the "furniture" Jimmy is supposedly selling and becomes paranoid about what awaited her, that ratchets up the tension for the rest of the movie.

I guess all that "fun" craziness, though, despite its feeling realistic and plausible, still doesn't make it a top-ten movie in my estimation. That was my only real question: why THAT movie in the top ten rather than a bunch of others that seemed more iconic or classic but that appeared way further down the list...

I'll chalk it up to a little bit of subjectivity and a lot of good use of music, tension, and one focused "mob story."

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For sure, and I'm not flabbergasted by the love or anything. I'm just working backwards from the fact that I don't adore it, and just trying to figure out why. I could say "I just don't" (and a lot of people do just that), but I've never found the mere cataloguing of opinions to be that interesting, personally. I like talking about the why. There may be no accounting for taste, but that doesn't mean there's no taking account of why we have the taste we do.

Maybe the "bravura filmmaking" itself is the explanation: maybe that feels tonally dissonant with the subject matter, even if it's technically impressive, or would land differently in another film. I'm not sure, but I like talking about it.

Most of Apocalypse Now is some of the best filmmaking I've ever seen and enough for me to call it a great movie. It just doesn't finish the job.

I agree with most of the reasons people have mentioned why Goodfellas deserves to be as high as it does. Also it’s ****ing funny.

Goodfellas, along with say Pulp Fiction, are the types of films that I find endlessly rewatchable and endlessly entertaining - I just never get tired of them. They are a rich tapestry of cinematic genius, memorable characters, snappy dialogue, and excellent music that just gel together in a way that approaches perfection in film for me. I remember going to see Goodfellas at the cinema, and wanting to immediately buy another ticket to watch it again as I was walking out of the theater. I didn't...but I wanted to!

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Me too, and I even remember exactly what I was drinking

At that point in my life, I was most assuredly baked out of my mind along with the band of hooligans I used to hang out with back then.

We were probably at the same cinema. I saw it at the Assembly Square Mall in Somerville.

There isn't going to be much to say about GoodFellas anymore when it actually shows, but I'm game.



Scorsese's GoodFellas, while perhaps deceptively and massively entertaining, demythologizes the movie gangster in a way its cinematic predecessors did not. Well, other than perhaps Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. But a much, much smaller percentage of people have seen that film compared to Scorsese's and I prefer the tone of GoodFellas to Leone's operatic fever dream. In The Godfather, though completely different in tone than the older classic of the genre like Little Caesar, Public Enemy, and the original Scarface, the Corleones are still admirable characters one roots for. Honest thieves. Sure they murder and have built an empire on crime, but the brilliance of Coppola's film is how it is framed around the family dynamics. They just happen to be gangsters but those dynamics might have been as compelling no matter what the profession. GoodFellas nixes all of that and while there is camaraderie and a loyalty code not to rat, there is no pretense that these are honorable men. Even though Henry Hill never kills anyone it is clear he is an opportunistic cockroach. Charming, less psychotic than Tommy and more trusting than Jimmy, but an opportunistic cockroach all the same. He doesn't want harm to come to his wife or children on a basic level, but he'll also keep mistresses and does whatever he wants if it suits him.

Michael Corleone we watch turn from somebody who wants no part of his family's criminal enterprise who then bolts into action out of loyalty to his father and anger toward the men who tried to kill him, and then bit by bit becomes a ruthless son-of-a-bitch who will even order the death of his own brother. It is an arc that is operatic and tragic, but because he started out as an innocent to it all you stay with him through some horrible choices. Henry Hill is just a low-level scumbag looking to make money without working at a square job. As a child he idolized their lifestyle without knowing exactly the brutality it took to acquire it. When he finds out it doesn't scare him at all. He revels in it.



GoodFellas rather brilliantly and masterfully takes you along for the ride with some very bad men. Between Scorsese's filmmaking skills, the buoyant tone and dark humor, and the likeability of the actors you are complicit as a viewer. By the time it gets to that fantastic sequence before he is arrested you also get to feel what it is like to be coked up and paranoid. When it all comes crashing down there is no moral to be learned but instead it was a visceral examination of these scumbags that the movies and the media in general have lionized for generations.

That is what makes GoodFellas so different and, to my mind anyway, better than even a great piece like the first two Godfather flicks. I don't know if the amorality is what you don't like or that you feel tricked for empathizing with such horrible people, but as a filmmaking feat and as demythology I think GoodFellas is peerless. And like Shakespeare's King Lear and Hitchcock's North by Northwest it is also Scorsese's magnum opus, incorporating all of the best themes and techniques from his earlier films and making one perfect new thing that both feels familiar and is unique.


That's why it was high on my ballot, anyway.

Would have been either The Natick Lowes or whatever cinema was in Shopper's World on Rt. 9, also in Natick, at the time. I want to say that was a General Cinemas, maybe? Those were the two I frequented back then.

I'm over in that area every week now but I never went to the movies there. We ought to hook up for dinner some time after winter and COVID. We're the same age too.