Overrated

Rating: 7/10 (27 August 2002)

No doubt a good movie, but to place it among the top ten is foolish. It hasn't introduced anything new at any cinematic level. Its influence on the living trends of cinema is practically zero (no interesting movie made after The Godfather owes anything to it). It's the paradigmatic example of what Fredric Jameson calls nostalgia cinema, a pastiche of the old conventions of gangster movies, a kind of funerary monument. Classical cinema ended long time ago (probably in the fifties), and this movie is just a well-done late survivor, a kind of aesthetic dinosaur.