Raging Bull (1980)

The review highlights the film’s resistance to personal arcs and redemption in its portrait of elemental brutality. The restored print allows the blood to still drip from the ropes in this savage Bronx middleweight story.

The review declares Raging Bull everything it is cracked up to be, a peerless imprint of what cinema can aspire to in art, truth and exhaustion. It singles out the contrasting docu-drab and dreamily inventive black-and-white cinematography, along with De Niro's performance, for particular praise.

The critic praises Scorsese’s complex, bruising vision of violence, masculinity, and self-destruction in the film, highlighting its avoidance of reductive psychology and its visceral, subjective boxing sequences and performances.

The critic finds Scorsese’s 1980 biopic a brutally nihilist tale that remains full of despairing beauty and unforgettable performances. The sheer brio and kinetic energy of the nightmarish boxing scenes are singled out as utterly unique.

Canby calls the film Scorsese's most ambitious and finest work to date, with Robert De Niro delivering a titanic, career-best performance as the inarticulate, furious Jake La Motta. The movie is praised for its lyrical effect amid nonstop physical violence and its intelligent screenplay that refuses easy sociological or psychiatric explanations.

The review calls Raging Bull a potent tragedy of a brutal pugilist at war with himself and a truly extraordinary modern classic. It singles out Scorsese's tautly choreographed ring sequences and the performances of De Niro, Pesci and Moriarty.

Benson describes the re-release as one of cinema’s most breathtaking films, with its black-and-white perfection, inky shadows, deliberate graininess, and poetic images that fix the Bronx setting in memory. She notes how a decade has shifted audience reactions to the brutish La Motta and praises the brilliant editing by Thelma Schoonmaker.

Kael views the film as a biography of the prizefight genre and an exploration of movies, violence, and gritty visual rhythm rather than a straightforward rise-and-fall biopic. She highlights Scorsese and De Niro pushing deeper into inarticulate, elemental characters while noting the exact details of 1940s Bronx neighborhoods alongside the lack of specific psychological insights into La Motta.

The critic sees the film as an intense exploration of a man's brute force, anger, grief, and inability to view women beyond a madonna-whore complex, with De Niro and Scorsese fearlessly depicting the protagonist's limited emotional range. He praises the raw portrayal of jealousy, violence, and guilt channeled through boxing and personal relationships.

The critic examines Raging Bull alongside Cassavetes' Gloria, highlighting Scorsese's expressive, metaphysical approach to gangster and boxing stories rooted in ethnic New York life, Catholic guilt and transcendence. It contrasts this with Cassavetes' more therapeutic, performer-driven realism, noting the film's rigorous realism mixed with total subjectivity and its focus on La Motta's masochistic absorption of punishment.

The film is an impassioned work asking huge questions about self-hatred, guilt, the punishment of the human body and the will to survive. It singles out Robert De Niro’s performance as Jake LaMotta for praise while noting the excess and anger make it too much for five stars.

The review finds the protagonist one of the most repugnant in recent cinema but highlights the boxing sequences as possibly the best ever filmed and the film's capture of a boxer's intensity. It notes the visceral power of the fights alongside the offputting character that may limit broader appeal.

The critic calls it the most unromanticized movie biography ever produced by Hollywood, praising De Niro's brilliant and transformative performance along with the intense, brutal fight sequences. However, the review faults the film for lacking dramatic structure, having a dull improvisational quality outside the fights, and overly stylized techniques that highlight the rest of the film's lack of energy.

The review calls Raging Bull a remarkable character study of Jake La Motta’s rise and fall, commending De Niro’s transformative performance, the realistic boxing scenes, and strong supporting turns while noting its enduring critical acclaim.