Wow. I just caught this on TV again with about five minutes’ notice and I feel like this movie has grown up with me. I now feel like I can put it up there with my favourite Scorsese movies: for the record, The Age of Innocence, Kundun and Taxi Driver. If you look at those titles you’ll notice they have one thing in common, great musical scores, and Elmer Bernstein’s work here leaves no hiding place for every shade of pain and beauty.

But there’s something here, I think, for everyone: whether you’re into comedy, sadness, story, acting, trippiness or good old-fashioned E.R. mayhem, it’s all here. I still remember the buzz I got when I first saw it on the big screen, right from the opening ambulance shot, how I laughed at the reckless use of ambulances, how I froze at the haunting images of the girl from Nicholas Cage’s past, how I cried at the death, how I sat, lost at the ending fade to white, and none of this has faded in the last five years, no matter how many times I’ve seen it. There’s so much to behold, so many images – Cage pulling the dead out of the ground; “Red Red Wine” playing over the drug-dealer hanging scewered off an apartment block; the three companions Cage has to work with, like the three ghosts in “A Christmas Carol”; the eyes of the old man pleading for release from life. This movie kills me in so many ways, yet it’s so full of life.