MOVIE · 1984

Once Upon a Time in America

CrimeDrama229 min

A former Prohibition-era gangster returns to Manhattan’s Lower East Side after decades away, where the people and crimes that defined his youth refuse to stay buried. Robert De Niro is Noodles, looking back on a life that begins with Jewish kids on New York streets in the 1920s and stretches through the rise of organized crime into the 1960s. James Woods’s Max stands at the center of that shared past, while Elizabeth McGovern and Tuesday Weld are woven into the men’s shifting loyalties and regrets. Sergio Leone frames the story through memory, moving between friendship, ambition, and the violence shadowing both.