Directed By Barry Levinson

Starring – Robert De Niro, Cosmo Jarvis, Debra Messing

The Plot – Vito Genovese and Frank Costello (Both De Niro), a pair of Italian Americans who were rivals for control of a major crime family in the mid-20th century. Genovese attempted to assassinate Costello in 1957, although Costello retired from the mob.

Rated R for violence and pervasive language

The Alto Knights | Official Trailer

POSITIVES

Seemingly, no actor has been featured as prominently in the gangster movie subgenre than De Niro, and despite the cautiousness of performing what essentially feels comfortable to him, “The Alto Knights” breaks new ground for the 81-year-old actor, in which he channels two performances simultaneously for the price of one. While this gimmick is never given reasoning or logic for its portrayal, De Niro does an excellent job emulating the differences in demeanor for Frank and Vito that allows us to see them as two living, breathing characters, and while Frank is essentially just Robert portraying himself, the Vito side of things actually affords the grizzled veteran to dig deep for some legitimate acting, with both a softer vocal range and unrelenting greed that drives the character down some pretty darkly devastating avenues of exploration. It’s certainly nowhere close to De Niro’s best work, but it’s admirable that even at his age that he refuses to evidently sleep through roles, and his screen presence is just as captivating as it ever was, even in a movie that he’s undoubtedly too good to be a part of. In addition to De Niro’s simultaneous strides as a leading protagonist and antagonist to the movie, the film is blessed by bountiful production values in everything from the costume and wardrobe design, to set decorations, to even the occasional grainy cinematography that allows the film to teleport seamlessly to 1957 New York, where a majority of the story is set. The more elaborate scenes and sequences in public are most admirable, with an abundance of intricate detail that allowed this film to soak up as much of its documented 45 million dollar budget as possible. Lastly, while the structure and storytelling are both a bit of an erratic mess, the one aspect about the material included that I did appreciate involving the true story of gangsters owning gay bars during the 50’s and 60’s I found especially compelling because no other gangster film to my memory has covered this strangely ironic aspect. It’s essentially only part of the film during the opening act, but it offers a responsible take towards depicting history that I wish more films would coherently utilize, working wonders to illustrate the uncomfortable populace that they were not only able to take advantage of in business, but also towards politics.

NEGATIVES

Imagine starting a TV series at around the 6th episode of a proposed 13-episode series, and you have the introduction to “The Alto Knights”, which not only begins at a pivotal event taking place around an hour into the film, but also serves as the tip of the iceberg for what is arguably Levinson’s most sloppy direction to date. I make this argument because the film’s structure and its storytelling are often an erratic mess, with a consistent bombardment of dramatic subplots finding their way to the forefront of the focus, with so little time and effort paid to their various developments. This is made worse by the film’s desire to supplant Frank as a reliable narrator to the entirety of the film, where spontaneously and quite sporadically he pops in overhead to deliver some of the most prolonging summaries that I’ve ever heard, all in order to casually skip over some of the more fascinating elements in the rivalry between these two gangsters. This is followed up from the perception of Frank staring dearly into both the camera and a distant void to the left of the camera, to which nobody ever properly materializes by film’s end, and while it might help some audiences and their dwindled investments to catch up and understand what is transpiring in the hodgepodge of hurled subplots, stacking characters and rapid fire developments, its decision to tell us everything that it should be showing us made it a constant chore to latch onto any character or predicament that casually arose between them, leaving the first half of the movie a continuous battle of overcoming the adversity of remaining invested to a story that I had absolutely zero interests in. To be fair, the second half of the movie is improved a bit, particularly in the faithful focus towards a long-term conflict that it takes ample time to brew the dramatic influence within it, however Levinson’s direction remains just as problematic in the second half as it did in the first, with the film’s erratic editing practices and intrusive visuals overflow leaving the focus of the film feeling like it had Attention Deficit Disorder, while attempting to emulate what I can only interpret as documentaries. This would be fine for an opening sequence spanning no longer than ten minutes, but real-life photography and archived footage of both New York City and classic movies involving gangsters, for some reason, find their way abruptly into nearly every scene or sequence in the movie, and its desire to constantly throw as much at the screen as possible makes it one of the more conflicting investments that I’ve experienced in 2025. On its own, the editing schemes are bad enough, particularly those that often and abruptly fade to black whenever it feels like characters aren’t properly finished interacting, but it’s so much worse when the script begins to include multiple timelines in its many talking points, and what you ultimately end up with is a choppily incoherent mess that attempts to focus on too big of a timeline within these characters, when more time given to a shorter period would’ve served it exceptionally. This obviously works wonders on the movie’s pacing inside of its two hour runtime, as the unorthodox structure involving so few moments of down time or proper building, chaotically threw me off to where I was at any given moment in the exploration, with frequent checks of my watch during the movie’s second hour, which made time and pacing stand as heavily and unrelenting as a concrete statue, leaving this film feeling twice as long as the three-and-a-half hour 2021 gangster film, “The Irishman”. Finally, while De Niro is doing the heavy lifting of dual performances, the supporting cast is offering little balance and help for him to save some of his energy, though none of it feels on the fault of the actors and actresses themselves, but rather the lack of material given to their characterization, which makes so many of their performances feel like abstractions instead of people brought to life. The worst of these is definitely Debra Messing, who typically just serves as the human response to the awful things happening in Frank’s life, but even in the case of someone like Katherine Narducci, whose fiery intensity bouncing off of Vito leaves a little bit of a lasting memory during the opening act, she’s quickly dismissed by a story that is constantly moving in fast-forward, eliminating her all together by the film’s half-hour mark, which is all the more tragic when you consider that Narducci was able to hold her own against one of the very best actors of our time. Everyone else is either an Italian stereotype or not important enough to hold relevance to the storytelling, and considering the movie throws an army of them at the screen throughout its endurance test of a duration, the lack of investment towards a single one of them made this movie’s dramatic muscle fall as flat as possible, especially when the stakes aren’t as firmly established as necessary to characters who essentially create their own laws.

OVERALL
“The Alto Knights” is one of those compelling true stories in American history that basically writes itself, but Barry Levinson’s conflicting direction involving erratically rushed storytelling and a distracting presentation leaves it falling as flatly uncompelling and occasionally incoherent as disappointment can possibly conjure. Despite a dual performance from Robert De Niro still bringing leading man appeal and gripping presence, the film is a tediously taxing bore that does nothing to restore gangster flicks to their ideal prominence, leaving it another colossal bomb for Warner Bros., whose success rate has definitely seen better days.

My Grade: 4.5 or D-