Every Martin Scorsese Film Ranked Worst To Best

In Raging Bull, Robert De Niro gives his best-ever performances playing Jake LaMotta, an intense and troubled boxer who seems to only gain pleasure from life when he's beating someone up or getting pummelled himself. He's savage, cruel, and fuelled by rage.

The boxing scenes are as hard-hitting and discomforting now as they were forty years ago, directed by Scorsese with more intensity than any film in the Rocky franchise by eschewing realism in favour of a more subjective view of what it's like to be in these fights.

Even out of the ring, the movie is all about violence, since LaMotta lives and breathes it.

Raging Bull is also, in many ways, Scorsese's most influential and unforgettable project - a dark and adrenaline-fuelled sports drama that every film in the genre has had to accept they'll never level.

It's about more than sports, of course. It's also about passion, self-destruction and arrogance, and between Scorsese's genre-defining action sequences and De Niro's untameable lead performance, Raging Bull is nothing short of a moviemaking masterclass, sure to stand the test of time for years to come.