The Alto Knights

The Alto Knights (2025)

38% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 103 reviews)

Runtime: 120 minutes

Directed by: Barry Levinson

Starring: Robert De Niro, Debra Messing, Kathrine Narducci, Cosmo Jarvis, Michael Rispoli

From: Warner Bros.

“Tired” is the best way to describe The Alto Knights. A little more than a half hour after the screening of Ash finished, I sat down to view a movie watched in part due to someone on a messageboard expressing interest in the movie (for it being a modest R-rated drama, which isn’t common in Hollywood) and they hadn’t viewed it yet. Plus, why in the world was Robert De Niro playing both the lead characters? Well, that query was never answered as there’s no good explanation for it besides “stunt casting.”

Note that my middling rating has zero to do with the movie finally being greenlit after the idea has been around in Hollywood for at least FIFTY years by Warner Brothers Discovery’s CEO, the guy who I refer to as Voldemort despite not reading any of the books or viewing any of the movies. Cultural osmosis is how I know the meaning of the name; I especially don’t want to name the $#%#$@% for his decisions made this month. It doesn’t even have anything to do w/ how a certain word is constantly heard. F-bombs seem to be a prerequisite for gangster movies; for all I know, Vito Genovese constantly used the F word multiple times in a sentence. It still wasn’t preferable to my tastes.

However, my main complaint is that the film isn’t all that exciting; Goodfellas, it ain’t. The fact that there was no reason for De Niro to portray both the lead Frank Costello and the antagonist Genovese is another issue. How the story was told and presented was something I took objection to; a literal slide show is part of the presentation. All that stated, The Alto Knights (the name of the club the two leads were a member of in their youths) wasn’t a bad movie, mainly due to my interest in the real-life story of the gangster who has a façade of legitimacy (Costello) and the unabashedly gangster Genovese.
The movie unfortunately made me feel sleepy too often; a shame. 

Wikipedia articles apparently would have been more informative to learn about those two men and the Mob world in general. The general Mob antics, a fine performance from Debra Messing, generally fine filmmaking and a period soundtrack meant that The Alto Knights was “OK” instead of “lousy” or downright bad. I appreciate that various old men (including director Barry Levison and director Irwin Winkler) collaborated on something that isn’t “commercial” in 2025 but did it anyhow… you can’t help but feel crestfallen that a picture like this is not a classic like Goodfellas—or is even just good.