Critics reviews

[T]he foreign perspective of Leone and his Italian collaborators lend Once Upon a Time in America a fabled dimension, a detached yet emboldened point of view...

In intermingling distorted fairytale with gangster narrative, Leone casts an outsider’s perspective on the underlying greed, ruthlessness and betrayal at the heart of the attainment of social mobility and status in American society. He leaves the viewer with a searing vision of the vicissitudes of dreams gone awry.

At its worst (the middle hour) it's uninspired gangster scrapes, and the childhood scenes - which I used to think were the high-point - clearly suffer from some bad juvenile acting, but the overall sense of elegy still (just about) carries it. Funny how De Niro's inert performance was acclaimed as a revelation at the time, whereas now it's just the same grumpy middle-aged guy he's been playing for the past 15 years.

As Noodles steps into the tomb, Leone's camera makes endlessly, possibly pointlessly, choreographed long maneuvers, and the music swells, turning its soapiest. 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.

Once Upon a Time in America begins and ends in an opium den; everything that happens after this point in the non-linearly-presented timeline may be a hallucination. Besides introducing this narrative ambiguity, De Niro's stupor mirrors the viewer experience. America's pacing pleasures are narcotic, creating a strong sense of time passing, crucial for endowing the final flashback montage with recalled resonance for patient viewers. Crudities and all, America earns its scope.

Did Leone make a genuine masterpiece or simply the most Proustian gangster movie ever? ...Seen today, this rise-and-fall chronicle will make you nostalgic—not for the days of New World shtetls and Borsalino-wearing bad guys, but for an era when giants walked the earth and made excessive epics with scope, substance and a true sense of cinematic grandeur, once upon a time.

Every gesture is immediate, and every gesture seems eternal. Leone accomplishes all of this within the framework of a superb popular entertainment: it's a funny, rousing, brilliant piece of work.

Ultimately America is much more than just a gangster picture... But it's at its deeper level that the film transcends genre and becomes something much more profound. It's a movie about the unreliability of memory; about ageing and guilt and indelible regret.

Though the film is defined by its bravura aspects, Leone managed to keep the acting of his two stars as understated and muted as the picture’s carefully modulated color scheme.

Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America", which in its intended 227-minute version is an epic poem of violence and greed, was chopped by ninety minutes for U.S. theatrical release into an incomprehensible mess without texture, timing, mood, or sense.