Once Upon a Time in America Reviews

Here was a filmmaker who specialized in pure, blistering images, and this operatic earthiness just doesn't play as well as the horrifying, salacious stuff.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

Sergio Leone's languid, lovely and lengthy ode to Lower East Side mobsters (more specifically, mobster films) ...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

Sad and vast yet compelling throughout, this remain Leone's most towering achievement.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Handsomely mounted beyond a shadow of a doubt, but as the final statement in Leone's career, it mostly makes me think of how fantastic his Westerns were.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10

Leone is less interested in arousing an audience's easier emotions than in presenting, at a dispassionate distance, the horror of two men warily walking toward each other on a tightrope suspended above the snake pit of their , deepest compulsions.

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Every gesture is immediate, and every gesture seems eternal.

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While The Godfather delivers certainty and a comforting dramatic resolution, Once Upon A Time In America delivers a profound kind of mystery.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

In a post The Godfather world, for Leone to even consider taking on an epically scoped New York gangster film took tremendous courage if not foolishness, Coppola had set the bar at an impossible height.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4

A disappointment of considerable proportions.

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Spaghetti western master Sergio Leone turns his eye toward an American gangster epic spanning 50 years with surprisingly positive results.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

Sergio Leone's cut is wonderful! Avoid the butchered theatrical version unleashed in the U.S.--I actually walked out on that indecipherable mess.

| Original Score: 5/5

Hugely complex, achingly sad and splendidly gorgeous.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Pure cinematic bliss.

| Original Score: 5/5

While Leone's vision still has a magnificent sweep, the film finally subsides to an emotional core that is sombre, even elegiac, and which centres on a man who is bent and broken by time, and finally left with nothing but an impotent sadness.

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Sergio Leone's swan song is an undisputed masterpeice, a self-reflexive crime-gangster epic with towering performances from De Niro and Tuesday Weld.

Full Review | Original Score: A

Haunting, thematically complex.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

There are times when we don't understand exactly what is happening, but never a time when we don't feel confidence in the film's narrative.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

A obviedade da meia hora final compromete o impacto do filme - que, ainda assim, impressiona por sua escala épica, por suas elegantes transições de tempo e ótimas atuações.

| Original Score: 4/5

I'm as big a fan of misogyny as the next guy, but how did this hateful and often tasteless Godfather ripoff become a classic?

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Visually stunning, rich in detail, and filled with outstanding performances.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5