A powerhouse of an epic.

Rating: 10/10 (20 September 2016)

Once Upon a Time in America (the director's cut) is one of the greatest films to ever be created and grace our reality. Sergio Leone, the man behind 'The Good, the Bad and the Ugly' and 'Once Upon a Time in the West', gave us 'Once Upon a Time in America', his last feature before he passed away in 1989. He left us a legacy as ambitious as his films, and his movies are his own love-letters to Westerns, crime films and basically life itself (at least this film).
A story about Jewish gangsters, Leone's final masterpiece is a harrowing, wide-scoped story that is told from the perspective of David "Noodles" Aaronson spanning from the 1920s to 1968. It's an impacting journey and you feel the regret Noodles carries with him from his past: through things that are revealed in HIS present, we learn a little more about his past that we didn't see coming. The film jumps all across different points in time, something cinema can tell so much better than any other medium, when done right like it is here.
Even though the film is great, the story behind the making of it was far from outstanding: Warner Brothers made a mandatory cut to the US version of the film (it was cut from nearly 4 hours to 2), and as a result it flopped in America and left Leone 'heart-broken' prompting him to never make another movie for the remainder of his life. Despite this though, the European cut was a great success and critics like Roger Ebert cited that version as the best film of 1984. It was a success in retrospective, but at the time it was a struggle for Leone.