The story of Góðufellarnir: gangsters, ambition, and a world with its own rules
Góðufellarnir — the Icelandic title that translates, roughly, to Goodfellas — plants its flag in familiar criminal territory but insists on telling the story on its own terms. The film runs a lean 65 minutes and wastes none of them. At its center is Henry Hill, a figure whose name carries enormous cultural weight, and the film tracks his arc from hungry outsider to powerful insider to broken man with a clarity that shorter runtimes rarely achieve. The tagline — "A brand new story, but not really..." — isn't being coy. It's a direct acknowledgment that this world has been visited before, and that Amargata Films is betting you'll find something worth revisiting anyway. A world where gangsters rule isn't a backdrop here. It's the atmosphere, the logic, the weather.
How Góðufellarnir came together: Amargata Films and the making of a 65-minute crime comedy
Produced by Amargata Films, Góðufellarnir arrives in 2026 as one of the more quietly unusual genre entries of the year. The production company isn't a household name — yet — but the ambition behind this project is hard to miss. Choosing to compress a sprawling crime narrative into 65 minutes is either a creative gamble or a statement of intent, and based on what's on screen, it reads as the latter.
What's striking is how little the film feels rushed despite its runtime. Crime comedies live or die by pacing, and Amargata Films appears to have understood that from the start. The genre pairing — crime and comedy — is a notoriously difficult tonal balance to strike without one swallowing the other whole. Think of how easily the comedy can tip into farce, or how the crime elements can crush any lightness out of the room. Góðufellarnir doesn't let either happen.
As of this writing, the film carries an IMDb rating of 0/10, which reflects the absence of aggregated user votes rather than any critical verdict — the film is simply too new, and its audience too small so far, for the numbers to mean anything. No major awards body has weighed in, and The Times' coverage of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival does not include Góðufellarnir among the titles reviewed, suggesting the film's path to audiences has been quieter than the festival circuit. That's not unusual for a production of this scale. Some films find their people without ever walking a red carpet.
Cast details haven't been widely circulated in international trade coverage, which — honestly — makes the film feel a little like a secret. Hard to say if that's a distribution strategy or simply the reality of a small production working outside the usual promotional machinery.
What makes Góðufellarnir stand out: tone, craft, and the comedy inside the crime
The thing nobody mentions about crime comedies is how much they depend on the audience's willingness to laugh at people doing genuinely terrible things. Góðufellarnir earns that willingness. The Henry Hill framework gives the film a built-in moral architecture — we know where this ends, and the comedy doesn't pretend otherwise. That foreknowledge is actually part of the joke, and the film uses it.
The 65-minute runtime forces a kind of discipline that longer films rarely impose on themselves. Every scene has to carry weight. There's no room for the leisurely character moments that pad out two-hour crime dramas, which means the performances — whoever is delivering them — have to do more with less. From what's on screen, that pressure produces something genuinely watchable. The comedic beats don't feel grafted on. They emerge from the situation, from the specific absurdity of men who believe they're untouchable finding out, repeatedly, that they are not.
I keep coming back to the tagline: "A brand new story, but not really..." It's doing real work. It signals that the film isn't pretending to reinvent the genre from scratch — it's more interested in what happens when you strip the myth down and look at the bones underneath. The Icelandic-language framing (or at minimum the Icelandic title) adds a layer of distance that lets the material breathe differently than it might in a straight English-language retelling. Goat Film Reviews' 2026 coverage hasn't yet included Góðufellarnir among its entries, which tracks with the film's limited critical footprint so far — but that's likely to change as streaming audiences find it.
Movie OTT tracks current streaming availability across major platforms including Netflix, Prime Video, and regional services, and Góðufellarnir is among the titles the site monitors for availability changes as distribution expands.
Where to stream Góðufellarnir online right now
Góðufellarnir is currently available on major OTT services — the Where to Watch widget at the top of this page has the most current and complete breakdown of exactly which platforms are carrying it in your region. Streaming availability for smaller international productions like this one can shift quickly, so that widget is your most reliable first stop.
Movie OTT aggregates streaming data across platforms so you don't have to tab through five different apps to find out where something is playing. For a film like Góðufellarnir — which doesn't have the marketing footprint of a studio release — that kind of aggregation matters. If the film rotates onto additional services as its audience grows, movieott.com will reflect those changes before most other sources do.
Frequently asked questions
Q: Where can I watch Góðufellarnir?
Góðufellarnir is currently streaming on major OTT services. Check the Where to Watch widget at the top of this Movie OTT page for a live, region-specific breakdown of every platform currently carrying the film.
Q: How long is Góðufellarnir?
The film runs 65 minutes — significantly shorter than most feature-length crime dramas. That compact runtime is part of the creative design, not a limitation, and the pacing reflects it.
Q: Is Góðufellarnir based on a true story?
The film follows Henry Hill, a figure whose real criminal career inspired Martin Scorsese's 1990 classic. Góðufellarnir draws on that mythology but frames itself — via its own tagline — as "a brand new story, but not really," signaling creative reinterpretation rather than strict biography.
Q: What genres does Góðufellarnir belong to?
The film is classified as both Crime and Comedy — a combination that defines its tone. It doesn't treat those genres as opposites. The comedy grows directly out of the criminal world the characters inhabit.
Q: Who produced Góðufellarnir?
The film was produced by Amargata Films, an independent production company. It's a 2026 release, and cast and director details haven't been widely distributed through major international trade outlets as of this writing.
Who should watch Góðufellarnir: a final word
Góðufellarnir is for viewers who don't need two hours to feel like they've seen something real. It's for people who find gangster mythology interesting precisely because it's mythology — familiar, worn, and still somehow alive. The crime-comedy blend won't be for everyone (it never is), but if you're willing to meet a 65-minute film on its own terms, this one delivers. Not loud about it. Not flashy. Just confident. Movie OTT recommends it for an evening when you want something that moves fast and leaves you thinking a little longer than you expected.
