Death of the Mob Movie (2025)

Director Barry Levinson’s The Alto Knights closes the casket on a genre birthed 50 years ago.

Mainstream entertainment media has all but buried “The Alto Knights.” U.S. Ticket sales confirm this, and the worldwide box office hammers home that point. But this is no excuse for the utterly lackluster film I paid to see from one of my favorite Directors.

Let me state this immediately: I love Barry Levinson’s films, and I adore the Mob film genre.  Not only that, I admire the writing skill of Nicholas Pileggi, his books, and the subsequent screenplays he has aided in writing based on his books.

But what I watched today at my local theater was not a cinematic representation of what I’ve come to expect from Levinson, Pileggi, or even Mr. De Niro.

This was something…other.

THIS FILM was NOT something Barry Levinson should have delivered, and I hate saying that. It doesn’t even look like something Levinson filmed. It seems like something Barry Levinson started to film in 2022 and finished just a few months ago in 2024 and was forced to release in 2025. As a fan of Levinson’s work throughout his storied career, I have never seen a movie he directed that had so many jarring fade to black scenes. Also, of despicable note, Robert De Niro aping his performance in The Irishman: talking directly to the screen and borrowing dialog from the 2019 film directed by Martin Scorsese. I’ve never cringed in my seat as much as I did at these moments.

The plotline of The Alto Knights is possibly the most boring mob subject ever covered in film. However, most of the story is true; It has been acknowledged and/or covered in several other films. Because it doesn’t involve massive amounts of blood and guts or any action, it is entirely understandable why this story has been passed over during the storied history of filmed mafia films. The viewer needs to know the history of organized crime before seeing “The Alto Knights.” To follow this opulently filmed story, the viewer NEEDS to know their organized crime history from coast to coast. They also need to be of a certain age. Over 50 seems to be the demographic, but even then, those of us of that age or beyond are challenged even further.

Robert De Niro plays both main characters, and not without some glaring missteps, despite De Niro making a solid effort to portray each character as a separate “person.” De Niro portrays Frank Costello and Vito Genovese, two significant real-life forces in organized crime in New York. The movie focuses on the 1957 “dust-up” between Costello and Genovese, a botched murder, and the results of such.

Although this story is essential to those who care about mafia history, it is filler within “The Alto Knights.” Keep in mind the movie’s focus circles around this premise. The title of the film, “The Alto Knights” is barely covered at all. De Niro, as one of his two characters, barely mentions The Alto Knights S.C. (Social Club) in a lackluster series of flashback photos, some of them real, some of them glaringly faked, while giving the movie-goer a sub-par history of New York mob history. No scenes in the film take place within The Alto Knights Social Club. Not even for a second, and we are all aware of the actual history of the NY mob.

The audience for this movie already knows the history of the Genovese Crime Family and Frank Costello, the offshoots of both, and the history that each begets for decades to come. The result is …completely underwhelming and ultimately severely confusing.

The one saving grace is the first believable cinematic representation of the historic Apalachin Meeting in 1957, where all the United States organized crime families met, depicting how it might have gone down. Unfortunately, this comes within the last 30 minutes of the film’s runtime. This bit of the film IS worth watching; however, it is the only one.

Wasted performances include Debra Messing and Katherine Narducci, both outstanding actors in TV and Film, who are not showcased enough in the movie's final edit. Despite their significance to the story, their characters are potted down and made to feel like background actors.

De Niro, unfortunately, makes the biggest mistake. He cannot, continuity-wise, play two separate characters without muddling each character’s voice back and forth. The make-up effects delineate the two characters fair enough, but often, De Niro himself slides back into sounding like both characters. The most alarming scene is where Vito Genovese and Frank Costello talk in a night club banquette and sound completely the same. To the audible confusion of the audience I watched the movie with.

Director Barry Levinson (Rain Man/Wag the Dog/Bugsy) is better than this. I know he is because even his 2017 HBO cable TV movie “Wizard of Lies” was more compelling. This was NOT a Barry Levinson film. It was a movie that Barry Levinson took very seriously, some years ago, along with writer Nick Pileggi, and somehow Warner Brothers, over the last two decades managed to completely fuck up. Then again, this is precisely what WB has done with almost every movie they have released as of late.

Director Barry Levinson, Writer Nick Pileggi, and Actor Robert De Niro are better than this. I know they are. Perhaps this is not their fault at all. It's entirely possible that WB is not at fault either (although they did ZERO advertising for the film). Perhaps The Mob movie has reached its end, but everyone involved with "The Alto Knights" helped to kill the genre and any serious studio interest in future offerings.