10 Movies That Tried To Exploit Nostalgia (And Won)

1. The Irishman

Martin Scorsese's masterful new film The Irishman has just landed on Netflix, and it near-impossibly manages to live up to the years of hype laid before it.

While it's easy to assume from the movie's marketing that Scorsese has effectively conceived it as a contemporary Goodfellas victory lap, co-starring Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci as it does, The Irishman is so, so much more than that.

The enticingly glossy veneer of Goodfellas' slick camerawork and nifty music is swapped out for a far more restrained, solemn style and tone, allowing the film to serve as a riposte of sorts to Scorsese's genre-defining crime classic.

But even so, The Irishman undeniably takes full advantage of our fondness for the careers of Scorsese, De Niro, Pesci and Al Pacino, especially during the film's soul-shattering third act, which serves as one of cinema's all-time great meditations on ageing and mortality.

Though its resonance with audiences won't be registered by box office receipts, between its near-universal critical acclaim and strong Oscar buzz, it's clear that the film has successfully leveraged nostalgia for a bygone era to ludicrously entertaining and unexpectedly devastating ends.