Film reviews: Robert De Niro is good value in genteel mobster movie The Alto Knights

Plus beautiful animation in Flow

Fri, 21 Mar, 2025 - 13:00

Declan Burke

The Alto Knights

★★★★☆

Aging mobsters ‘stomping around like extinct dinosaurs’ take centre-stage in The Alto Knights (15A), which opens in 1957 with the ‘Boss of Bosses’, Frank Costello (Robert De Niro), surviving a murder attempt orchestrated by Vito Genovese (also played by De Niro).

Once inseparable boyhood friends, now deadly enemies, Frank and Vito represent the Mafia’s dark and darker angels: Frank is a ‘Damon Runyon-type a guy’, now semi-retired from gangsterism and a respectable patron of charitable causes; Vito, however, is an impulsive sociopath who horrifies his fellow bosses by introducing heroin to the streets of New York.

Written by Nicholas Pileggi (Goodfellas) and directed by Barry Levinson, The Alto Knights is a genteel and occasionally rambling mobster movie that seeks to reinforce the cliché — as the title suggests — that there was something vaguely noble about the Mafia’s ‘Golden Age’, during which the mobsters embodied the rags-to-riches American dream.

Nonsense, of course, but De Niro is good value as he invests each of the lead roles with just enough nuance to sustain their yin-yang dynamic.

theatrical release

Flow

★★★★☆

This year’s winner of the Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, Flow (G) is a dialogue-free tale of a cat that gets caught up in a catastrophic flood, and is obliged to co-operate with other creatures — a lemur, a capybara, a secretary bird, and a Labrador — as they flee the rising waters aboard a drifting boat.

The climate crisis theme is to the fore, of course, but Latvian writer-director Gints Zilbalodis emphasises the inter-species collaboration as the characters learn to clumsily navigate their ark.

The animation is beautifully drawn, ostensibly simple but brilliantly effective at capturing the animals’ movement; and while the overall tone is dark (the only hint of a human presence is that of half-drowned crumbling ruins), the story is infused with a cautious hope.