Once Upon a Time in America

An operatic, elegiac crime epic that follows four childhood friends from a Jewish slum in New York through five decades of bootlegging, betrayal, and regret, this is widely regarded as one of the greatest gangster films ever made and the crowning achievement of its director's career. Its monumental visual storytelling — sweeping period tableaux cut against extreme close-ups — is matched by a celebrated, aching score and career-best central performances, with the lead pair's chemistry anchoring a story told as much through memory and mood as through plot.

The film is deliberately, almost defiantly slow, built as a mosaic of flashbacks, opium-haze visions, and present-day returns that demands real concentration to untangle, and critics agree it will test anyone unwilling to sit with nearly four hours of patient storytelling. Its most serious and sustained criticism concerns the treatment of women, above all two scenes of sexual violence that provoked furious reactions at the premiere and remain the work's most contested element; a significant strand of critical opinion holds that these choices undercut the film's elegiac ambitions, while some simply find the whole overlong.

No discussion of the film's reputation can avoid its fractured release history: the heavily shortened American release, which reordered the story and dropped roughly ninety minutes, was widely dismissed — some critics named it among the year's worst — while the full-length version earned the acclaim on which the film's standing now rests. The decisive critical disagreement was never really between enthusiasts and detractors of the same cut but between two different movies sharing one title. Its themes — friendship, betrayal, guilt, the corrosive pull of the American dream, and the impossibility of escaping your own past — give the work a mournful, retrospective gravity that rewards return viewings.