Screening from a new 4K digital restoration, Raging Bull is based on the life and career of former middle-weight boxing champion Jake La Motta, nicknamed the ‘Bronx Bull’. This ferocious fighter battered his way through family, friends, and foes in the 1940s, suffered a series of bruising humiliations in the ’50s, and ended up as a celebrity entertainer in the ’60s.

The extremes of his story don’t make for a conventional movie biography or boxing picture: Scorsese uses the material to explore the frightening limits of destructive sadomasochistic male aggression. It’s a work of enormous courage and dazzling technical virtuosity in which the language of violence and the violence of language become the binding elements.

Robert De Niro’s performance as La Motta is physically and emotionally overwhelming. He deserved his Best Actor Oscar, but Raging Bull is first and foremost Scorsese’s masterpiece.

Notes by Pete Walsh