Every time I watch this film I'm always blown away by how sad this film is. I'll forever go to bat for this film as Scorsese's best gangster film; better than Mean Streets, better than Goodfellas, better than Casino, etc. What always sticks out to me is the little pop-up text freeze frames that come up whenever Scorsese introduces a new character and immediately tells us how that person died. It's funny on first watch but it's almost frightening how…

Ok so that first half an hour is... pretty rough, and the callbacks heavily remind me of some of the worst traits you see in a lot of mediocre blockbusters today. There is no need to tie *literally* everything together. It's so funny that for a movie mostly about incredible death-defying stunts, the plot is so goddamn convoluted.

But it kicks into high gear pretty fast and the two major set pieces really make up for a lot of the…

For some reason I never read this in high school but I totally see why this is such an American classic. So full of heart and humanism. It works so well both as a slice-of-life roadtrip film and as a critique of the American Dream. Ford's imagery feels evocative (found myself very moved by the shot of them seeing California for the first time), but my favorite part of the film has to be the final monologue from Henry Fonda;…