Directed by Sergio Leone • 1984 • United States, Italy
Starring Robert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern

Sergio Leone’s years-in-the-making final masterwork does for the gangster film what his visionary spaghettis did for the western, brilliantly reimagining the genre as a vehicle for limitless stylistic expression. Magnificently recreating the look and feel of Prohibition-era New York City and set to a score by the great Ennio Morricone, ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA chronicles five decades in the life of Robert De Niro’s David “Noodles” Aaronson, who goes from Lower East Side slum kid to bootlegging mobster to old man reflecting on his criminal past. Leone’s coup is an intricate flashback structure, which lends this epic rise-and-fall saga a hauntingly elegiac undercurrent.