I want to love Once Upon a Time in America (OUaTiA). Sergio Leone‘s sense of scale and ability to capture the landscape have not diminished at all, and there’s a great basic story here with a very cool generational progression, but at times the acting is extremely poor for such a major feature, and the script can be an absolute joke. Every insertion of sex in this movie is genuinely embarrassing, with one in particular being an incredibly irresponsible depiction of rape. OUaTiA routinely destroys its nostalgic sentimentality with inconsiderate sensationalism.