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A raw, loose, and deeply influential crime drama that feels less like a conventional mob movie than a portrait of male loyalty, Catholic guilt, and self-destruction on a neighborhood block. Its energy, texture, and performances make it essential viewing, even if its shaggy structure and abrasive characters won’t… Read more
Where to watch: Buy
Sun · 1h 52m
Director: Martin Scorsese
Starring: Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval
A small-time hood must choose from among love, friendship and the chance to rise within the mob.
Martin Scorsese
Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, David Proval
A raw, loose, and deeply influential crime drama that feels less like a conventional mob movie than a portrait of male loyalty, Catholic guilt, and self-destruction on a neighborhood block. Its energy, texture, and performances make it essential viewing, even if its shaggy structure and abrasive characters won’t work for everyone.
Mean Streets is where Scorsese finds the pulse of his signature world: Catholic shame, masculine bravado, and the constant threat that a joke, a debt, or a bad impulse can turn fatal. It feels alive in a way that many crime films only imitate, with scenes that drift, collide, and suddenly explode. The movie’s power comes from how intimate it is; the neighborhood matters as much as the plot, and the people feel trapped inside their own habits and loyalties.
Harvey Keitel gives the film its wounded conscience, while Robert De Niro arrives like a live wire, all charm and chaos. Their relationship is the engine, but the film is also about the social ecosystem around them: bars, churches, back rooms, and street corners where masculinity is performed and tested. Scorsese’s use of music and movement gives the film a restless, feverish rhythm.
It is not a clean morality tale and it is not trying to be. The violence is ugly, the humor is dark, and the emotional stakes are often buried under swagger. That’s exactly why it lasts: Mean Streets captures the feeling of living among people who love each other badly, and cannot quite escape the damage they keep making together.
Muriel · 2942 likes
1973 is the year martin scorsese fell in love with robert de niro
maria (3.5★) · 2350 likes
i'm gonna be calling all them dumb bitches who don't like scorsese's films a mook from now on
amaya (4★) · 2246 likes
mean in the streets, catholic repressed gay in the sheets
SilentDawn (5★) · 1090 likes
96/100 This was my first Scorsese joint, and for many years after that knockout viewing on Late-Night TV, it was my personal favorite film of his. It has a reckless, dangerous, and innocent energy that dances through every image, but the eventual tragedy is birthed from the discovery of harsh realities. It was, and still is, an incredibly sensual work. Every location, from dive bars to pool halls, is lit with the same evocative sense of boyish clumsiness and the… more
Branson Reese · 1001 likes
Watched it again because I love it. Two things jumped out this time: 1: For how often Scorsese uses violence he really goes out of his way not to romanticize it. This movie especially captures what a fight really truly feels like: sometimes two but usually just one guy who’s a fucking lunatic just going apeshit and basically everybody else is trying to get away from each other. 2: DeNiro looks like he’s in Oasis lol
Another defining New York character study from the same era, with alienation, urban menace, and a feverish psychological edge.
Shares the same interest in masculine self-destruction, Catholic guilt, and volatile behavior rendered with brutal intimacy.
A more expansive crime saga, but it carries forward the same fascination with charm, loyalty, and the rot underneath criminal glamour.
Shows Scorsese’s early sensitivity to character, place, and emotional instability outside the gangster frame.
For viewers drawn to awkward social tension, delusion, and a darkly comic sense of desperation.
A nightmarish New York descent that trades mob life for urban panic, momentum, and escalating bad luck.
A modern crime drama about survival, hierarchy, and the making of a criminal identity through pressure and loyalty.
For its epic reflection on male bonds, memory, and the long shadow of criminal life.
A sharp, tense gangster film where ambition, territory, and betrayal collide in a city under strain.
A bleak, lived-in crime film from the same year that shares Mean Streets’ sense of low-level criminal exhaustion.
For its raw street realism and devastating portrait of people trapped by their own impulses.
A great New York crime picture with a strong sense of place, pressure, and working-class urban texture.
male friendship, Catholic guilt, crime and loyalty, self-destruction, neighborhood life, masculinity, violence, moral conflict
crime drama, 1970s, New York City, Catholic guilt, male friendship, street-level realism, violent, gritty, character study, neo-noir