This article appeared in the April 11, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Alto Knights (Barry Levinson, 2025)

Once upon a time, Barry Levinson was funny. His early films show his knack for comic chatter—like in Diner (1982), when Paul Reiser’s Modell, an armchair semanticist, describes his quibble with the word “nuance.” “It’s not a real word,” he says. “Like gesture. Gesture is a good word. At least you know where you stand with gesture.” As Levinson’s career progressed, the warmth of his humor curdled into satire in films like Toys (1992) and Wag the Dog (1997)—intriguing works of cultural and political ridicule that leave a harsher taste in the mouth. But lately, any inkling of Levinson’s authorial touch has been harder to spot: he hasn’t released a movie theatrically since 2015’s wretched Rock the Kasbah, and most of his recent films, HBO biopics of controversial men—2010’s You Don’t Know Jack (about Dr. Death, Jack Kevorkian), 2017’s The Wizard of Lies (about financial swindler Bernie Madoff), and 2018’s Paterno (about disgraced football coach Joe Paterno)—are as dull as they are grim.

Still, when it was announced that his new movie, The Alto Knights, would be a sweeping gangster picture with a multimillion-dollar budget, a script by Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, and two starring roles for Robert De Niro, it seemed to present something of a comeback opportunity for an undervalued American auteur—or, alternatively, a massive trap for a director whose style has calcified in his recent works. I’m sorry to say that the latter has proved true: The Alto Knights is a confused film with little to distinguish it from the somber, straight-to-streaming dramas Levinson has made the bread and butter of his late career.

The Alto Knights opens in 1957, a watershed year for the New York mob that saw the attempted murder of Frank Costello (De Niro), the boss of the Luciano crime family. The botched hit was ordered by Vito Genovese (also played by De Niro), a Luciano underboss and Frank’s onetime childhood friend. “Vito was born, really, in a small town on the side of Mount Vesuvius,” Frank explains, theorizing that his hotheaded nemesis has volcanic DNA. In looking back and tracing the falling arc of their friendship, the film also charts several decades of tristate Mafia history as it builds to the powder keg of ’57.

From the beginning, Levinson seems unsure of what kind of movie he’s making. The Alto Knights wants to be a tale of lost friendship, but it’s difficult to mourn what only exists in a few black-and-white photos and reenactments. It wants to be a mob movie, but, perhaps hamstrung by its own milquetoast conception of historical fidelity, lacks a fresh take. Most intriguingly, The Alto Knights flirts with the courtroom drama: first during a sequence depicting Vito’s well-publicized split from club-owner Anna, played by a perfect Kathrine Narducci; and second in the film’s recreation of a Senate committee hearing that involved both Vito and Frank.

But just when the movie seems to find its footing, its competing genre agendas push back on each other, resulting in a film rushing to serve its many masters. The snappy repartee of Diner is nowhere to be found: in an exchange between Vito and the hit man who botched Frank’s murder (Cosmo Jarvis), the witty, repetitive grammar of mob banter (“He’s not dead. He’s not dead. Guess what? He’s not dead!”) is chopped up with bombastic cutaways to Frank at the hospital. Levinson and overactive editor Douglas Crise, itching to mix registers, are too impatient to let the script’s shambling charm shine.

The film trades on the gambit of its two De Niros, upping the ante after The Irishman (2019) gave us a digitally de-aged version of the actor. The stunt casting is not only a stroke of style but the movie’s raison d’être. De Niro playing both sides of the Vito-Frank relationship is meant to amplify the emotional and psychological tension of friends turning on one another. Their first meeting, teed up to be dramatic, takes place in a candy store from their childhood, but the flat, prosaic conversation squanders this perfect setting. De Niro acting opposite himself is a reasonable challenge, but the film fails to imbue it with any more brio than one finds in an SNL sketch. When Frank and Vito end up in the same prison, a climactic parlay seems inevitable, if only to justify the gimmicky casting. It never comes.

Pooled together, there’s enough Hollywood cachet to explain how this got greenlit, but not why—why make this? Perhaps with his recent slew of portraits of true-life notoriety, Levinson felt he was onto something. Those films fell short of interrogating American culture, but at least they were marginally topical. The Alto Knights, a period piece that brings nothing new, artistically or intellectually, to its historical source material or the present moment, is an instant anachronism. It’s too much to say that the film is in dialogue with the great mob movies of yesteryear—if anything, it’s repeating their echoes, dressing up in worn-out costumes and talking to itself in a mirror. In the end, all The Alto Knights can do is point to better films and try to siphon off their success. Levinson seems willfully uninterested in recapturing the endearing warmth of earlier work. To quote Modell in Diner once more: “Is he crazy? Or am I mistaken?”

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.