hard to feel anything but unadulterated disdain—MUCH less care or interest—for this man after watching him commit atrocity after atrocity, including (but certainly not limited to) two violent rapes. sir your name is NOODLES you and your buddy egg salad sandwich can sit the hell down.

even in general, the film never says or does anything interesting enough to justify the agonizingly long runtime. every single woman and girl exists to either get ogled or raped—sometimes both. i wish i could say there‘s even a single exception. the pretty, romantic score undercuts any attempt to criticize the gangster lifestyle, effectively doing the opposite and glamorizing it even further. this is made even more glaringly obvious when the film culminates in…

Last night we finished our Sergio Leone screening series with his magnum opus, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA. Rahul Kohli curated and presented our Leone screenings, which started last summer with A FIST FULL OF DOLLARS, FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE, THE GOOD THE BAD & THE UGLY, ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST, and ended last night with this film, Leone's final work and - I think - his masterpiece.

The story behind the film is a fascinating one - Leone's 229-minute epic was butchered by its distributor, who cut over 90 minutes from the film without Leone's consent or participation, resulting in a disastrous mess of a movie that ended Leone's career on a note of abject…

I kinda hate gangster films. This isn't a new idea to me, but this film more or less crystalized what I hate about them. In short, gangsters are not Robin Hood. They do not rob from the rich to give to the poor. They do not empower the poor; they feed off of them. They do not fight injustice disguised as law; they simply treat the law as coincidental. The closest argument you have is that they gave immigrant populations recourse to power in a system that hated them, and that is certainly true. But you rarely see them wield that power toward anything but assimilating into the system in a backward sort of way. While some gangster films have…

Checking in at just under four hours, Once Upon a Time in America takes a long time to say absolutely nothing unique. A gangster film, the film does nothing for the gangster genre that could not be accomplished in a far shorter runtime because oh my God is this thing long. It just takes forever to end and even then, I still had no idea why it took so long. I love gangster films with The Godfather Parts I and II being among my favorites. I even like Black Mass and Live by Night, which have hardly been universally beloved. Yet, I could not enjoy Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. There are many repulsive elements included that…

In Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone traces the rise of Noodles and Max (superbly played by Robert De Niro and James Woods) and their gang of very young Jewish immigrants who, as they grow up, will reach the top of New York's organized crime scene. The film begins and ends in a den above a Chinese shadow puppet theater, where Noodles is used to smoke opium, a drug that increases visionary abilities and alters the perception of time. And it is precisely time that is the real protagonist of the film. A succession of events spanning over fifty years, broken down into a complex interlocking between different planes and moments, in a skilful game of flashbacks and…