Awesome movie my friend

I found this one of those movies that pulls you right in until you are immersed in the story, Utterly fascinating with great characters.

Comes close to achieving masterpiece status, but doesn't quite make it. Based on a true story, "Goodfellas" is the flip side of "The Godfather" coin. "The Godfather" is a genuine masterpiece, but it presented the romanticized mythology of the Mafia, just as "Gone With The Wind" presented the romanticized mythology of the antebellum South. "Goodfellas" is its grim, brutal reality; there's nothing heroic about the greedy, vicious thugs in "Goodfellas". Ray Liotta is superb as the Irish-Italian mob go-fer Henry Hill. If anything, Joe Pesci is even better as the homicidal half-pint spinning out of control. At one time, Robert DeNiro was probably the best actor working in American cinema. Those days are long gone; he's perfected his "DeNiro shtick" and basically reprises that shtick from one role to the next. Playing Jimmy Conway (based on real-life Lucchese hitman and thief "Jimmy the Gent" Burke, who died in prison of stomach cancer not long after the film was released), DeNiro isn't quite doing shtick, but he's not putting forth a whole lot of effort either. It's essentially a walk-through for him. Still, for all that, it's hard to take your eyes off DeNiro when he's on the screen, especially when you realize that the ruthless character he's playing is based on an actual flesh-and-blood human being and that the murderous events depicted, the wholesale blood-letting and carnage and savagery, while fictionalized somewhat, actually happened. The latter portion of the film does begin to drag, and Scorcese succumbs to his habitual weakness of trying to cram too much music into too little screen time (he's got good taste in music, but I have a CD player if I want to stroll down memory lane), but "Goodfellas" still remains one of the more powerful and disturbing crime dramas of recent decades. Certainly, it's the best thing Scorcese or DeNiro (or Liotta, for that matter) have done in years.

Very strong. Good performances all around and a gritty, plausible script. Has a few moments where it seems to lose momentum, but otherwise eminently watchable.