Sergio Leone’s final masterpiece isn’t a gangster movie; it’s a four-hour eulogy for lost youth, broken dreams, and the friends who stab you with both the knife and the smile.

Robert De Niro’s Noodles ages like cursed wine: from street rat to kingpin to haunted old man sucking on opium just to forget. That 35-year time-jump structure is brutal genius; every time you think you understand betrayal, Leone flashes back and twists the blade deeper. The rape scene is unforgivable (and meant to be), the synagogue reunion will make you sob like a child, and that final smile in the opium den? The most devastating “what the hell just happened” in cinema history.

Ennio Morricone’s pan-flute theme haunts you for days. The 1920s-30s New York looks like a fever dream painted in cigarette smoke and blood. Young Scott Tiler and Jennifer Connelly break your heart before they even grow up.

It’s too long, too cruel, too beautiful. The 229-minute cut is sacred; the butchered 139-minute version is a war crime.

Watch it once, feel your soul leave your body, then never be the same again.

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