10 Greatest Movies About Death

If many went into Martin Scorsese's The Irishman expecting a decades-later reprise of Goodfellas, they were in for quite the morbid surprise.

Instead, Scorsese's mob epic is basically an elegy for the charmingly roguish characters we all fell in love with in Goodfellas.

Here, Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro) and his fellow mobsters are depicted in decidedly more pathetic fashion, their untimely deaths such an inevitability that countless characters are even introduced with title cards detailing the date and cause of their demise.

But The Irishman becomes something else entirely in its bleak third act, where the remaining gangsters begin succumbing to illness and old age one by one, revealing the empty futility of their lives of crime.

It's a superb inversion of the considerably slicker Goodfellas, offering up a chilling meditation on mortality and ageing that's one of the most powerful works Scorsese has ever produced.

In many ways it feels like the sort of film only a filmmaker of Scorsese's age and seasoning, now almost an octogenarian himself, could make with such blunt honesty.