Raging Bull !exclusive! (2026)

Decades later, Raging Bull remains a landmark not because it makes boxing look exciting, but because it makes violence look ugly and tragic. It refuses the easy redemption arc of most sports films. LaMotta does not learn a lesson, find peace, or reconcile with his family. He ends the film alone, in a cell or a shabby dressing room, still raging against a world he cannot control.

The engine of the film’s drama is not ambition but jealousy. LaMotta’s pathological suspicion of his wife (a luminous Cathy Moriarty) and his brother/manager Joey (Joe Pesci, in a career-defining role) fuels every act of cruelty. Scorsese frames Vickie through LaMotta’s gaze—a slow-motion, voyeuristic lens that turns her into an object of both desire and suspicion. When a handsome young fighter, Tony Janiro, is seen talking to her, LaMotta does not confront him verbally; he later beats Janiro’s face into a pulp in the ring, punishing him for a crime that exists only in his imagination. Raging Bull