Mean Streets — IQ Score 162/200

Scorsese's 1973 Little Italy film that defined his American-Catholic moral architecture for the next half-century. Harvey Keitel's Charlie and De Niro's Johnny Boy operate inside the religious-guilt-as-criminal-economy register Scorsese never fully left.

The hand-in-the-flame opening and the pool-hall fight sequence are early manifestations of the formal commitments (rock-soundtrack-as-structural-material, Catholic-iconography-as-shot-language) that define the work.