Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta, revealed its secrets to the BBC. There was some trepidation when Martin Scorsese unveiled Goodfellas at the Venice International Film Festival on 9 September 1990. The director's previous film, The Last Temptation of Christ, had generated no small amount of controversy when shown at the same festival two years previously. A crowd of 25,000 Christians had protested outside Universal Studios in Los Angeles when it opened in the US, a Paris cinema where it was playing had been set on fire, and Scorsese himself had received death threats.

Initially, the signs for Goodfellas had not been promising, either. Warner Bros' test screenings had gone badly, with reports of multiple people walking out during the film's violent opening sequence, in which actor Joe Pesci's vicious and unstable character repeatedly stabs a wounded gangster with a kitchen knife. But Scorsese needn't have worried. Goodfellas opened to huge critical acclaim, and he picked up the festival's Silver Lion award for best director. The film went on to earn six Oscar nominations, with Pesci's terrifying turn as Tommy DeVito, based on real-life gangster Thomas DeSimone, winning him the Academy Award for best supporting actor. Goodfellas is now widely recognized as a cinematic masterpiece. Just a decade after it was released, it was selected by the US Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

The film is based on Nicholas Pileggi's 1985 bestseller, Wiseguy, and anchored by a charismatic central performance from Ray Liotta. It chronicles the true story of Irish-Italian Henry Hill's rise and fall in the world of organized crime. Starting as an eager-to-please teenager who runs errands for local gangsters in Brooklyn, New York, Hill works his way up through the criminal ranks with the aid of his mentor Jimmy Conway (played by Robert De Niro, and based on real-life mobster James Burke) and his friend, Pesci's volatile DeVito. (BBC/ Getty Images)