“As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster,” Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) muses near the start of “Goodfellas,” and in the fall of 1990, when that film was released, it seemed that every filmmaker of note wanted to make a gangster movie. Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas” led the way that September, with Phil Joanou’s “State of Grace” and Abel Ferrara’s “King of New York” opening later that month. The Coen brothers’ “Miller’s Crossing” followed in October. And in December came what was expected to be the biggest title of them all: “The Godfather Part III,” the long-awaited follow-up to the Francis Ford Coppola films that most audiences considered the gold standard of gangster pictures. Instead, the other gangster movies of that fateful fall 30 years ago would prove far more influential: they combined to draw a map of the routes the crime movie, and movies in general, would take in the coming decade.

Source: New York Times September 16, 2020 13:52 UTC