And as it turns out, working for the mafia isn’t much different than any other job - you spend 30 years busting your hump to climb the ladder, only to end up face down on a bloody carpet in some tacky house in the burbs. Where Coppola went inside the walls of organised crime’s one percent, Scorsese’s gangsters are more blue collar. And for a movie about violent career criminals, it’s also strangely relatable. Certainly, the former is more easily rewatchable, owing to its breakneck pacing – its two and a half hours (and three decades) just whiz by. Based on the true life of mobster Henry Hill, Goodfellas was born in the shadow of The Godfather, but as the years go on, the question of which is more influential becomes mostly a matter of generation.

‘As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.’ Ray Liotta’s opening line is the crime movie equivalent of ‘Once upon a time…’, and what follows is Martin Scorsese’s version of a fairy tale – the story of a starry-eyed Brooklyn kid who realises his boyhood dream and still comes out a schnook in the end. 🏆 The most deserving Oscar winners of all-time Written by Abbey Bender, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Bilge Ebiri, Ian Freer, Stephen Garrett, Tomris Laffly, Joshua Rothkopf, Anna Smith and Matthew Singer Because being a true movie lover sometimes means hating other people’s movie opinions. We’ve included everything from era-defining blockbusters to little-seen cult classics, silly comedies to brutal horror, pulse-pounding thrillers to loud-and-proud action flicks.Įven so, we probably left something out that’s going to set you off.

It spans a hundred years and multiple countries. That’s why, in putting together this list, we’ve tried to cover as much ground as possible. Maybe it’s the way a beloved movie begins to blend into your own memories, like an actual lived experience. Maybe it becomes the thing that gets you through hard times, or makes you appreciate life’s better moments. Perhaps it’s because the movies that mean the most to us never really leave us. There’s something about cinema that really fires people up – and rightly so. It’s the nature of the list, and the nature of film fanatics, too. We didn’t set out to ruin your day, but we know that any article ranking the greatest anything is bound to raise the audience’s blood pressure and get them screaming at their computer screens – especially a list of the greatest movies of all time. What you’re about to read is going to annoy you.

I Once Was a Monkey by Jeanne M. Lee