Once Upon a Time in America

Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America opened in 1984 in two radically different cuts: the 229-minute European version Leone intended, and a re-edited, chronological 139-minute US release that critics and Leone himself disowned as a butchery. The full director's cut is now the standard release. It was Leone's last film, made after his retreat from the Western, and he had spent more than a decade developing it.

Across three timelines (1923, 1933, 1968), Noodles (Robert De Niro) returns to the Lower East Side of his Jewish immigrant childhood and reckons with the friendships, betrayals and one defining act of violence that shaped his life. James Woods plays his partner Max with feral charisma; Elizabeth McGovern is Deborah, the dancer Noodles loved and could not protect. Tonino Delli Colli's photography and Ennio Morricone's score (the Cockeye-Deborah theme is among the most beautiful things Morricone ever wrote) set the film's elegiac register.

The film works the way memory does: episodes overlap and time loops back, and whether what we are seeing is memory, dream or witnessed event has been argued over by critics for forty years. The 2012 Cannes restoration added back twenty-six minutes of cut material, and the debate over which cut is definitive goes on. Nobody disputes the ambition, or the film's place among the great long-form American crime epics.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most ambitious gangster film ever made, and Leone's greatest. A four-hour memory of an immigrant century that stays as open to interpretation as anything in the medium.