The Alto Knights preview screening provided by Universal Pictures.
While the odd gangster film does pop up every now and then, the genre has felt like it’s been on life support for the better part of ten years. With misses like The Many Saints of Newark (2021), Capone (2020) and Gotti (2018) coming to mind, it’s no surprise why that feeling is in the air. The Alto Knights isn’t a terrible film for the genre, but it doesn’t exactly have the legs to stretch beyond being simply another story about honouring a code and betrayal between close friends.
Knowing that Barry Levinson’s film has been in development since 1970 gives a world of perspective in understanding how this subject matter and story would have been eaten up in the heyday of the genre. The fact that this has been released in 2025 to audiences that have either seen the genre be done to death or are seeking out alternative stories, hasn’t worked in its favour. That’s not to say that these stories can’t work for modern audiences, with The Irishman (2019) providing a unique look at ageing crime figures mixed with wider political commentary, while Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) is masked as a crime-thriller but uses themes from the genre and orients them around Native American plights in history (the difference being, you guessed it, Martin Scorsese).
The Alto Knights, by contrast, is slow, it’s weighty, and it doesn’t reinvent itself or its framing of events in a new and crisp way for the genre. It’s a by-the-books gangster drama that cuts to one of Robert de Niro’s two characters, Frank Costello, looking down the barrel of the camera and narrating various parts of the film. It’s a shortcoming of the film that speaks to the rest of the exposition and general hand-holding that’s overdone in its roughly two-hour runtime (modest, for this sort of film). But The Alto Knights isn’t inherently bad, rather, it’s just a bit too textbook for my taste in that it doesn’t really offer much we haven’t seen from some of those aforementioned similar films.
Taking place across different time periods, but mainly in the mid to late 50s, Levinson’s film focuses on the friendship and betrayal between Frank Costello and Vito Genovese (both played by Robert De Niro). After Costello survives an assassination attempt from one of Genovese’s henchmen, Levinson takes us back in time from the incident to show us how the duo got to that point of division. It sees familiar tropes like courtroom scenes and political unrest take place as power dynamics switch from one boss to another, in this case from Genovese to Costello.
De Niro plays both characters with a classy, but sharp edge that’s like child’s play for him at this point. The supporting cast aren’t nearly as interesting as his dual performances though, with many of the actors bordering the line of “too much wise talking” while lacking the screen presence to match De Niro (even Cosmo Jarvis is relegated to a mumbling mafioso, a ways away from his breakout performance in hit series Shogun).
The script sometimes feels contrived, in part because there’s clearly a lot going on to the point where we need De Niro speaking all of the exposition, and the jumps in time don’t exactly help, with part of me wondering whether a version exists that doesn’t become bogged down in the final third where the pace begins to falter after we’ve finally caught up to all of the backstory.
The Alto Knights is a been-there-done-it kind of crime film, one that feels like it’s come a bit too late to have its subject matter and story land, but it hits the beats we’ve come to expect from similar films. For what it’s worth, seeing De Niro saddle up for any mobster film is a blessing, no matter how many times he does them, but where The Irishman felt like a capstone of sorts to the genre and the actors who brought it to life, The Alto Knights doesn’t quite find the same level of ingenuity.
The Alto Knights opens nationally from today.
Rating Frames 