Poster © Warner Bros.. Shown at reduced size for review and commentary.
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GenreCrime & Drama
RatedR
Runtime3 hr 49 mins
ReleasedSeptember 28, 1984
StreamingSee Where to Watch
DirectorSergio Leone
StarringRobert De Niro, James Woods, Elizabeth McGovern
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Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
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| TTMDB | +Add to Top 8 |
| Once Upon a Time in America's Details | |
| Genre | Crime & Drama |
| Rated | R |
| Released | 05/23/1984 (Cannes); 06/01/1984 (US); 09/28/1984 (Italy) |
| Streaming | See Where to Watch on this page. |
| Running Time | 3 hr 49 mins |
| Budget | $30M (reported) |
| Box Office | Updated daily from Box Office Mojo. See the numbers below. |
| Based On | The Hoods 1952 novel by Harry Grey |
| Country | Italy, United States |
| Language | English, Italian |
| Once Upon a Time in America's Interests | |
| General | Pocket watches, fedoras, Prohibition speakeasies, the Manhattan Bridge, a train station locker key. |
| Music | Ennio Morricone, with Deborah's theme and a pan flute that will follow you home. |
| Movies | Leone's 1968 epic, Once Upon a Time in the West. Same director, same patience, more dust. |
| Television | Boardwalk Empire. More Prohibition bootleggers, spread across five seasons. |
| Heroes | Fat Moe. Runs the diner, keeps the secrets, always leaves the light on. |
| Once Upon a Time in America's Crew | |
| Director | Sergio Leone |
| Writers | Leonardo Benvenuti, Piero De Bernardi, Enrico Medioli, Franco Arcalli, Franco Ferrini, Sergio Leone |
| Producers | Arnon Milchan |
| Cinematography | Tonino Delli Colli |
| Music | Ennio Morricone |
| Edited By | Nino Baragli |
| Production | The Ladd Company, PSO International, Embassy International Pictures, Rafran Cinematografica |
| Distributed By | Warner Bros. (US), Titanus (Italy) |
Manhattan's Lower East Side, 1918. Teenage Noodles (Scott Tiler) pulls small jobs with friends from the block, until a sharp new kid named Max (Rusty Jacobs) muscles in on their turf and becomes his best friend. Noodles also has a crush on Deborah (Jennifer Connelly), who dreams of dancing and wants nothing to do with the streets. The film moves between three eras: their childhood, their Prohibition years as bootleggers with the grown Max (James Woods), and 1968, when an older Noodles (Robert De Niro) returns to New York over a letter he cannot explain. Sergio Leone directs. Two hundred twenty-nine minutes, three eras, one long memory.
Anyone who has gone back to the old neighborhood and found it changed. Pack a snack, it is almost four hours.
Almost four hours long, and somewhere in the middle of Once Upon a Time in America, Noodles commits an ugly act the film never earns back, then asks you to keep caring about him anyway. That’s a big stone in this shoe. The rest is a gangster movie that plays like a half-remembered dream, drifting between three eras under a smoky haze. The childhood section is the best stretch: kids running small scams in the shadow of the Manhattan Bridge, a boy on a staircase losing a long battle with a cream pastry, the pan flute floating over everything. James Woods plays Max like a con man who believes his own pitch. Robert De Niro mostly watches and remembers, which works better than it should. Box office was a shrug at $5.5 million worldwide, but its IMDb rating now sits at an 8.3. An 8.4 because it’s gorgeous, patient and haunting, with one choice I can’t forgive. $918 says you go looking for a cream pastry within a day of finishing this, and eat it slowly on purpose.
What works: The childhood chapters, the pan flute score, James Woods’s dangerous Max and a dreamy structure that makes the whole thing feel like memory.
What doesn’t: It runs nearly four hours, the time jumps can lose you, and an ugly act by Noodles poisons sympathy the film still expects you to give.
Who it’s for: Patient viewers who love slow, sprawling gangster epics and don’t mind a movie that leaves its biggest questions open.
Spoilers
Max faked his own death decades ago, took the gang’s money and rebuilt himself as a powerful public figure, and the letter brings Noodles to him so Max can ask Noodles to end things. Noodles refuses and walks out, Max may or may not step into a passing garbage truck, and the film drifts back to Noodles in 1933, smiling in the haze.
| Robert De Niro | David "Noodles" Aaronson |
| James Woods | Maximilian "Max" Bercovicz |
| Elizabeth McGovern | Deborah Gelly |
| Joe Pesci | Frankie Minaldi |
| Burt Young | Joe Minaldi |
| Tuesday Weld | Carol |
| Treat Williams | Jimmy Conway O'Donnell |
| Danny Aiello | Police Chief Vincent Aiello |
| Richard Bright | "Chicken Joe" |
| James Hayden | Patrick "Patsy" Goldberg |
| William Forsythe | Philip Stein |
| Darlanne Fluegel | Eve |
| Larry Rapp | Morris "Fat Moe" Gelly |
| Richard Foronjy | Officer "Fartface" Whitey |
| Robert Harper | Sharkey |
| Dutch Miller | Van Linden |
| Gerard Murphy | Crowning |
| Amy Ryder | Peggy |
| Estelle Harris | Peggy's Mother |
- (cur | prev) 14:30, 1 November 2026 DataBot +40 Numbers refreshed: IMDb users 8.3 / 10 (413,536 votes) → 8.3 / 10 (413,798 votes).
- (cur | prev) 14:30, 25 October 2026 DataBot +80 Numbers refreshed: box office chart updated; IMDb users 8.3 / 10 (413,264 votes) → 8.3 / 10 (413,536 votes).
- (cur | prev) 14:30, 18 October 2026 DataBot +40 Numbers refreshed: IMDb users 8.3 / 10 (413,247 votes) → 8.3 / 10 (413,264 votes).
- (cur | prev) 14:30, 17 October 2026 DataBot +400 Numbers refreshed: Worldwide box office $5.5M; Domestic box office $5.3M; Opening weekend $2.4M; Profit / loss (est.) -$42.3M; Rotten Tomatoes 86%; box office chart updated; Rotten Tomatoes critics 86% (56 reviews); Metacritic 75 / 100; IMDb users 8.3 / 10 (413,247 votes); movie.guru score 8.8.
- (cur | prev) 12:00, 17 October 2026 DataBot +2,000 Profile created from Wikipedia and Box Office Mojo: cast, crew, release dates, budget, official trailer.