Just a brilliant celebration of comic books, animation, and Spider-Man in specific. It’s genius to have the unpowered Kingpin be the principal antagonist here. But it’s also what prevents Kingpin from appearing in an MCU theatrical Daredevil flick.

Takes the Goodfellas template and improves upon it. Pesci and De Niro are considerably more well rounded and sympathetic than Liotta’s Henry Hill. Sharon Stone has substantially more to do than Lorraine Branco did. And Vegas is a cinematographer’s wet dream, both indoors and out.

Rewatch: watching the enjoyable first half again almost makes you forget how bad martial arts infused second half is. Duvall is a strong counterweight to Caan in the first part, so I’m not entirely sure why he’s all but disappeared from the second. The real villain pulling on all the players’ strings is the milquetoast Arthur Hill, a real letdown in this kind of macho action flick.

Peckinpah’s balletic, slow motion depiction of violence undermines the effectiveness of the hand to hand combat, revealing how staged and non-lethal the fights are when you can see how much the stunt performers are holding back.

Irreverent in the best way, its controversial take serves as a lens through which one can reexamine their preconceptions about a story one believes they already know all too well. The casting of the apostles with “street-y” New Yorkers is inspired… although I’m not sure the prosthetic Jewish nose slapped on Keitel as Judas would fly today.