For Fans of Goodfellas

Goodfellas ends where The Sopranos begins: in the dull purgatory of the witness protection program and the chronic dissatisfaction of a man built for a world that has shrunk around him. David Chase spent eight years unpacking what Scorsese compressed into two and a half hours. Tony Soprano is Henry Hill grown older and more self-aware, which makes him more tragic, not less dangerous.

Nicholas Pileggi's nonfiction book, published in 1986, is the primary source for the film. Scorsese and Pileggi co-wrote the screenplay together, and the book contains material that didn't make the cut, including a more granular account of Henry's drug operation and Karen's perspective at greater length. Reading it after (or before) the film gives you the whole story without Scorsese's compression.

Most crime games go for the sandbox playground. Mafia II goes for the Goodfellas feeling: a young man from a poor immigrant family pulled into organized crime by ambition and loyalty, who discovers too late that the organization is not a family but a machine for using people. The 1940s-to-1950s period design is meticulous, and the story earns its downbeat ending.

Sergio Leone's four-hour epic covers the same emotional territory as Goodfellas but across decades: friendship, betrayal, the way criminal success hollows out the people who achieve it. The director's cut restores the full structure Leone intended, and it rewards patience in ways that few films do. If Goodfellas is a sprint, Once Upon a Time in America is a marathon that arrives at the same finish line.