Once Upon a Time in America

It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed. It’s those reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement; the images seem to come at you in waves of feeling.

The movie's four hours long, but no one had the time to write a single real character.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest.

Adding 22 minutes only enhances Leone's brilliant saga of guilt and betrayal

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.

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

A bad movie at any length, swimming in the syrup of Morricone's score. But hey, some call it a masterpiece.

Once Upon a Time in America is a tremendous work that captures the animating ambition and sorrow at the heart of the American Dream.

...sprawling subject matter that's employed to admittedly erratic yet often striking effect by Leone...

...an epic of blinkered nostalgia.