New On Netflix: Once Upon A Time In America

The final directorial effort of Sergio Leone is just as much an epic masterpiece as his most celebrated western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Leone trades the sprawling plains of the old West for the mean streets of New York for this decades-spanning crime tale, as Jewish ghetto youths grow up to become powerful — and hopelessly morally corrupt — gangsters, played by Robert De Niro, James Woods, William Forsythe and James Hayden. The running time was cut considerably for its initial American release in 1984 (for which Leone was heartbroken), but Once Upon A Time In America can now be seen in all of its glory, with the director’s rough, violent and uncompromising vision intact — it asks for a lot of your time (almost four hours of it), but it’s oh so worth it.