Scorsese's brutal and bruising masterpiece uses the life of 1950s middleweight boxing champion Jake LaMotta to etch a searing portrait of male fear, violence, and self-torment. In an unforgettable, Academy Award–winning performance, Robert De Niro plays LaMotta as a man helpless before his own uncontrollable anger, his ferocity in the ring bleeding disastrously over into his domestic life with his wife (Cathy Moriarty) and brother (Joe Pesci). Welcoming his maulings in the ring as penance for his sins, LaMotta's greatest fight is ultimately against himself, and the "animal" he fears he is becoming. Rendered in lustrous black and white (a coolly beautiful contrast to the drama's heat and violence) by cinematographer Michael Chapman, and featuring some of the most striking, expressionistically heightened fight scenes in film history, Raging Bull is "the most painful and heartrending portrait of jealousy in the cinema … the best film I've seen about the low self-esteem, sexual inadequacy and fear that lead some men to abuse women" (Roger Ebert). http://tiff.net