Critics reviews

Despite all these forces striving for intimacy, Scorsese's vision nevertheless explodes into a behemoth of a film, the ultimate boxing movie, which ironically has little interest in the sport of boxing... It's like we are inside a stranger's skull as it's being beaten to a pulp, while at the same time we're on the outside looking in, being handed an X-ray. The result is a strange form of empathy: we feel vulnerable (in other words, human).

Scorsese is (with Godard) one of the rare directors to possess this sensual taste for filmic material, which overflows into an abstraction, and that leads to his experimentation with this black-and white and Super 8 film stock. This pseudo-amateurish footage troubles the film, and through these moments of family happiness, breaks the heterogeneous fabric of the film, like in a painting by Rauschenberg or an atonal composition.