Best movie of this year hands down!

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

What this movie is trying to say is that the best way to worship God is by caring for your neighboor. The message is provided in a kind of extreme way but thats what I got after all. The other 3 movies from Scorsese that I have seen I didn't like but this one ... man, this is good stuff.

A small-time hood aspires to work his way up the ranks of a local mob. Despite the talented 2 leads (De Niro and Keitel) and an amazing director like Martin Scorcese 'Mean Streets' is one heck of a boring drama and with terrible characters that i didn't feel anything about plus for half of the movie Robert De Niro talks like freaking Sylvester Stallone and he is annoying as hell and the same goes for Harvey Keitel because unlike Casino or Goodfellas where there's some affection with the characters this movie has none of that plus it's slow paced and drags alot from start to finish. Overall one big disappointment for me regarding a terrific director. (0/10)

Young into his career – only his third film – Scorsese was already in control of his maturing talent, his signature style was now on full display, delivering an absorbing portrait of Italian-American life of crime and redemption in the streets of New York (although most of the film was actually shot in Los Angeles).This force of nature of a film is powered by the outstanding cast, namely Keitel who plays a character which seems like an extension of the boy he played six years earlier in "Who's That Knocking at My Door", and De Niro in his unforgettable first role in a Scorsese film, playing Keitel's self-destructive mook of a cousin, Johnny Boy.Scorsese owed a lot of his gritty filmmaking style to directors such as John Cassavetes, but there are no films like "Mean Streets" before – it became the blueprint for modern movies. In 1967, he used contemporary music as a film soundtrack as opposed to a traditional score, an unheard of practice at that time and even before "Easy Rider" popularized that notion, it had since become a staple for many modern movies, here he used it again more effectively."Mean Streets" is rough around the edges, with bloody violence soaked in pop music – the antithesis of Coppola's glamorous gangster epic – and an early masterpiece from a director who will go on to make more.

Scorsese's first personal movie is a gangster epic that has all the hallmarks of the director's tour-de-force style that would reappear later in his career: from the fresh tracking shots to the unnerving camera angles, particularly one sequence where a camera is strapped to Keitel and the viewer takes part as he stumbles into a drunken stupor. The only real difference between this film and later offerings like GOODFELLAS is the budget, which at this stage in Scorsese's career wasn't great. Nevertheless the director crafts a plot-heavy epic which really puts across a picture of life in the big city, possibly more so than his second collaboration with De Niro, TAXI DRIVER.The film is quite slow-paced, which may be off-putting to some, and there isn't a great deal of the director's trademark violence to punctuate the more mundane moments as in his later movies – aside from the powerhouse climax, in which the red paint flows leaving the viewer feeling as if they've been punched in the face. Keitel is fantastic in the leading role and brings a real compassion to the part of the guy whose love for his friends gets him into serious trouble. However, as might be guessed, De Niro steals all his scenes here, as a small-time psycho who likes nothing better than to shoot his revolver from rooftops and beat up strangers on the street. De Niro is twitchy and deranged and scarily believable in this part, yet sympathetic at the same time too. He infuses his character with dynamism whilst at the same time invoking fear at the inescapable consequences of his actions. So, there you have mean streets: a typical enough gangster epic, infused with the energy of its young director and two stars, with enough originality, charisma, and hard-knuckle realism to make it a more than worthwhile watch.