One of cinema's most potent actor-director collaborations has been that of Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese; of their eight movies together, the finest has been the brilliant Raging Bull (1980). Pulsating with visceral energy, this stunning drama vividly charted the determined rise and self-destructive fall of the Italian-American boxer Jake La Motta who became middleweight champion in 1949. De Niro caught La Motta in all his paranoia and brutality and famously gained four stone to play him as a bloated older man. Scorsese effectively used slow-motion to capture the violence of boxing and black-and-white to heighten the realism of this remarkable cautionary tale.