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 139-minute chronological US release that critics and Leone himself disowned as a butchery. The full director's cut is now the standard release. The film was Leone's last, after his post-Western retreat; he had spent over 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 Morricone ever composed) define the film's elegiac register.

The film operates as a memory text: episodes overlap, time loops, the film's structural ambiguity — whether what we are seeing is memory, dream or witnessed event — has been the subject of forty years of critical debate. The 2012 Cannes restoration added back twenty-six minutes of cut material; the conversation about which cut is definitive continues. What is not in dispute is the film's ambition and its place in the canon of long-form American crime epics.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most ambitious gangster film ever made, and Leone's masterpiece. A four-hour memory of an immigrant century, with an interpretive openness that is as enigmatic as anything in the medium.