A former Prohibition-era Jewish gangster returns to the Lower East Side of Manhattan 35 years later, where he must once again confront the ghosts and regrets of his old life.
In 1968, the elderly David "Noodles" Aaronson (Robert De Niro) returns to New York, where he had a career in the criminal underground in the '20s and '30s. Most of his old friends, like longtime partner Max (James Woods), are long gone, yet he feels his past is unresolved. Told in flashbacks, the film follows Noodles from a tough kid in a Jewish slum in New York's Lower East Side, through his rise to bootlegger and then Mafia boss -- a journey marked by violence, betrayal and remorse.
"It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed. It’s those reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement; the images seem to come at you in waves of feeling." - Pauline Kael, New Yorker
"Leone is less interested in arousing an audience's easier emotions than in presenting, at a dispassionate distance, the horror of two men warily walking toward each other on a tightrope suspended above the snake pit of their deepest compulsions." - TIME Magazine
"...an epic poem of violence and greed." - Roger Ebert