| United Artists | Release Date: November 14, 1980 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
26
Mixed:
1
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Filmed in black-and-white and shockingly well acted by De Niro, Raging Bull suggests that if you are looking for the source of evil in the world, you don't have to look any further than yourself. It's inside you or it isn't. And it comes out or it doesn't. [19 Dec 1980]
One of the bloodiest and most beautiful reflections on atonement in the Scorsese canon... It is still one of cinema's most breathtaking films.
The entire film is played at such high pitch it may well exhaust audiences that don't come prepared. And, at the heart of the film, there is the mystery of Jake himself, but that is what separates Raging Bull from all other fight movies, in fact, from most movies about anything. Raging Bull is an achievement.
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A fiercely poetic study of violence. Stunningly shot in black-and-white. [14 Dec 1989, p.23]
Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull is the best American movie of the year, Scorsese's best film and at long last replaces Robert Wise's "The Set-Up" (1949) as the best film about prizefighting ever made. [24 Nov 1980, p.128]
It's about Scorcese and DeNiro's trying to top what they've done and what everybody else has done. Scorcese puts his unmediated obsessions on the screen, trying to turn raw, pulp power into art by removing it from the particulars of observation and narrative.
The first hour of the film sets up the situation with a naturalistic vigor and cinematic resourcefulness unique to Scorsese. He knows precisely how to move the camera, dress a set, direct his splendid actors, underlay the music, edit to keep the viewer off guard and consistently impressed. But Raging Bull has nowhere to go but down and out. As Jake follows the trajectory of his predictable degradation, the film threatens to become as bloated and repetitious as the fat ex-champ in his cups.
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There is no denying the emotional power of these scenes, but one wishes that Scorsese would end his Italian-American guilt trip and stop exposing mean-tempered, self-destructive characters like La Motta, whose personality problems, he apparently feels, stem from their cultural environment. Raging Bull ultimately has a numbing effect on the brain as if one's head had been pummeled by La Motta's so-called "girlish" fists.
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