Mean Streets, the most original American movie of the year, doesn't just explode—it erupts with volcanic force. It is a shocking, jolting, even pulverizing view of "Desolation Row," the claustrophobic, small-time petty Mafia world that is Martin Scorsese's vision of New York's Little Italy. In this semi-feudal empire, the random and the ritual, sacred and profane, and sane and insane are in perpetual conflict—and Scorsese shows us the turmoil bubbling beneath the society's surfaces just as he knows it, without a trace of Hollywood glamorizing, demystifying Italian criminal life even as he personalizes it….

Scorsese integrates realism, stylized elements, symbolism, surrealism and other nonlinear modes of exposition as part of a continuing struggle to relate method to meaning.

The film is suffused with an extraordinary realism. Scorsese's camera moves around like a tiger on the prowl, hand-held and lurking in forbidden places one moment, stationary, coolly...