Raging Bull (1980)

IMDb Listing
Based on the career of boxing legend Jake LaMotta, Raging Bull is justifiably one of the most acclaimed of all American films and perhaps the high-water mark of Robert De Niro’s career. Scorsese and his writers dispense with a lot of the usual sports cliches – I suppose it would have been tough to focus on LaMotta’s training regimens and exalt in his rise from underdog status just three years after Rocky – and instead focuses on the personality traits that drove him. The film depicts LaMotta as violently ill-tempered, fiercely individualistic, and insanely jealous of his wife Vickie (Cathy Moriarty). As for the latter, the film links Jake’s paranoia regarding Vickie’s imagined extramarital transgressions and his drive to destroy his opponents in the ring, and even suggests that it served as fuel for his distrust of the New York mafia, who pulled the strings in the boxing world at the time. As a result of this focus, the film can fell clautrophobic at times; despite the celebrated, gorgeous choreography of the fight scenes, even more of the movie seems to take place in the small city apartments that Jake and Vickie shared. Still, I think that the film is brilliantly structured, not just showing the life of a champion or showing us the times and institutions around him, but linking such disparate elements together thematically in a logical and organic way. 10/10