Another quick movie review no one was waiting for

I saw the 2015 Jonny Depp film Black Mass last week, on Netflix, and was surprised how good it was.

I see that it was better rated on Rotten Tomatoes than I thought (73%), but it didn't make much money at the box office.  (Just under a $100 million world wide).  

It's true:  it is very much Martin Scorsese territory, and I think some people may have thought it was too much a repeat of Goodfellas and the rest of his oeuvre.  But I thought of it more as Scorsese material but done with a better and more satisfying story arc.   It is nicely directed, and Depp and all of the actors are very good.

The other film it's unavoidably close to is Scorsese's The Departed, which I thought was really awful and couldn't stick with, and even my son didn't seem to care for it.   It is a much, much better movie than that.