The film industry skews young, but it's not impossible for directors to make a late-stage masterpiece decades after they first rose to prominence. Steven Spielberg has retained his creative streak for over a half-century, and Clint Eastwood managed to turn out one of the best films of his career with last year’s courtroom drama Juror #2. Even commercial disasters like Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga showed the type of imagination and ambition that wouldn’t be possible from a younger filmmaker who lacked their experience. However, Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights is the type of disaster that would derail the career of an emergent director.
Levinson’s gems within his eclectic filmography include Rain Man, Diner, Wag the Dog, and Good Morning, Vietnam. Even if Levinson occasionally missed the mark, there was reason to anticipate The Alto Knights, as an old-fashioned mafia epic would seem to be right up his alley. While overlong and over-dramatized, Levinson’s 1991 crime biopic Bugsy is one of the better mob dramas released in the immediate wake of Goodfellas. If Levinson was going to rip off anyone, there are worse directors to imitate than Martin Scorsese.
The Alto Knights was primed to be another entertaining Scorsese wannabe, as the screenplay was penned by Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote Goodfellas, Casino, and early drafts of The Irishman. Loosely inspired by the rivalry between the Italian mob bosses Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, The Alto Knights’ novelty is that Robert De Niro is cast in both roles, and given the opportunity to act opposite himself onscreen. It’s a trend in 2025 that’s seen multiple actors in dual roles within the same film, such as Theo James in The Monkey, Michael B. Jordan in Sinners, and David Corenswet in the last 30 minutes of Superman. But there’s no thematic gimmick to justify De Niro’s two roles in The Alto Knights.
The Alto Knights’ first mistake is that the failed assassination attempt on Genovese is included within the first five minutes, which is an early sign that the film can only diffuse its tension within the remaining two hours. Despite the presence of two gangsters mythologized by popular culture, The Alto Knights is largely confined to a single location in which the two criminal masterminds sit in a diner as they share words about their experiences. There’s hardly the type of electrifying tension present within the diner scene in Michael Mann’s Heat, but Levinson also doesn’t make room for the type of piercing reflection that made The Irishman a moving consideration of America’s criminal legacy. It doesn’t help that the film’s surprisingly tame; the rare moments of violence are so clumsily handled that it would be easy to mistake them for a parody like Analyze This.
While Killers of the Flower Moon allowed De Niro to create a terrifying villain worthy of Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, Silver Linings Playbook gave him the capacity to be warm, gentle, and sincere in a way he’d never been before. It may be easy to characterize De Niro’s performance in The Alto Nights as lazy, but the film’s tone is so misguided that anyone in front of the camera shares blame. In fact, De Niro proved earlier this year in the Netflix miniseries Zero Day that he could deliver an entertaining performance, even when faced with a lackluster script.
As The Alto Knights is told mostly through flashbacks and cutaways, scenes are only included because they’re essential to the plot, and rarely have time to offer an immersive perspective on the criminal lifestyle. A sequence similar to the restaurant tracking shot in Goodfellas would never be possible, as The Alto Knight is uninterested in the personal lives of its characters. Perhaps the skewed, passive point-of-view of both Costello and Genovese was an arctic choice, but The Alto Knights isn’t populated with enough memorable supporting characters to justify its bland protagonists. Cosmo Jarvis, the talented young star of Shogun and Lady Macbeth, is the only standout as Vincent Gigante.
Even if The Alto Knights wasn’t completely derivative, it's nearly impossible to contextualize its interpretations of Costello and Genovese when better versions exist. Costello’s name is shared with the villain of The Departed, played by Jack Nicholson in the last great film of his career. Even then, De Niro’s performance as Costello is more understandable upon recognition that the stern, foul-mouthed role of Genovese was written with Joe Pesci in mind. Scorsese may have lured Pesci out of retirement for The Irishman, but he has thankfully avoided any subsequent roles that would tarnish his resume.
What’s most surprising about The Alto Knights is the decline when compared to Levinson’s other recent efforts. He may have operated on a smaller scale, but Levinson’s direction of the HBO political films The Survivor, The Wizard of Lies, and Paterno showed his ability to make moving drama out of specific historical material.