Sergio Leone’s final and perhaps greatest film, Once Upon a Time in America is an intricately constructed New York gangster saga that shuttles between eras, plunging characters and viewer alike into an ocean of longing, regret, and rumination over what might have been. Robert De Niro and James Woods star as David “Noodles” Aaronson and Max Bercovicz, boyhood friends from the Lower East Side who build a doomed bootlegging empire. In a film that spans nearly 50 years, De Niro plays Noodles with furtive subtlety; his contradictions and flaws wash over the audience with methodic precision.