Spanning four decades, the film tells the story of David "Noodles" Aaronson, and his Jewish pals, chronicling their childhoods on New York's Lower East Side in the 1920s, through their gangster careers in the 1930s, and culminating in Noodles' 1968 return to New York from self-imposed exile, at which time he learns the truth about the fate of his friends and again confronts the nightmare of his past

Sergio Leone's languid, lovely and lengthy ode to Lower East Side mobsters (more specifically, mobster films)

— D. Fear