Raging Bull

Raging Bull is the most artistically ambitious sports film ever made — a biography of middleweight champion Jake LaMotta that uses boxing as a metaphor for self-destruction and transforms the ring into an expressionist canvas of violence, beauty, and pain. Martin Scorsese did not want to make a boxing movie. Robert De Niro spent years convincing him, and the result is a film that transcends its genre entirely.

De Niro's physical transformation is the most committed in cinema history. He trained with LaMotta for over a year, fought in three real middleweight bouts, and then gained 60 pounds to play the retired, bloated LaMotta. The performance earned De Niro the Academy Award, and it remains the gold standard for Method acting. But the physical transformation is in service of an emotional one: LaMotta is a man whose rage, jealousy, and self-hatred destroy every relationship in his life.

The fight sequences are filmed in black and white with a beauty that borders on the sacred. Scorsese shoots the ring as a stage — blood sprays in slow motion, ropes stretch like rubber, the crowd becomes abstract. The Sugar Ray Robinson fights are among the most visceral and beautiful combat sequences ever filmed. But Raging Bull is not really about boxing. It is about a man who can take any amount of punishment from an opponent but cannot handle the vulnerability of being loved. The final scene — LaMotta alone, rehearsing his nightclub act in a dressing room mirror — is devastating.