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where can i buy Lurasidone uk Double the De Niro, half the movie.

The Alto Knights stacks the deck with two Robert De Niros but forgets to deal the audience anything worth playing.

Barry Levinson directs this tired mob drama with all the zest of a rerun, stuffing De Niro into dual roles as real-life mobsters Vito Genovese and Frank Costello. The hook — two De Niros, facing off — should sizzle, but it barely simmers.

Instead, we watch the same old mob clichés: smoky backrooms, smirking consigliere, gunshots in the dark, blood on silk suits. The script by Nicholas Pileggi, adapting his own book Wise Guys, reads like it was dusted off from a 1990s drawer and never updated.

De Niro, an icon of the genre, appears tired here, as if even he knows this double billing is a gimmick. His Genovese stalks around with a stony glare, while his Costello delivers lines with a lazy drawl. There’s no true contrast between the two; both feel like faded echoes of better De Niro performances from Goodfellas and Casino.

The supporting cast fares little better. Debra Messing, Kathrine Narducci, and Cosmo Jarvis drift in and out of scenes without making a dent. Even the period detail, often Levinson’s strength, feels flat — a wax museum of fedoras and speakeasies.

Worst of all, the film drags. Clocking in at two hours, The Alto Knights sags under ponderous voiceover and redundant scenes of mob meetings that fail to escalate tension. Levinson, once a sharp chronicler of American life in Diner and Rain Man, seems lost in this joyless exercise.

Pileggi’s script offers scant insight into the psychology of these men or the shifting dynamics of postwar organized crime. What we get instead is a sepia-toned greatest-hits reel: a hit in the street, a courtroom scene, a wiretap, a betrayal. You can almost hear Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker shaking her head at the pacing.

One might argue that The Irishman already served as a swan song for this genre and for De Niro’s mob roles. The Alto Knights feels like an encore no one asked for.

Worse, it misunderstands what made those classics tick: not just violence, but humanity, betrayal, consequence. Here, characters move like chess pieces, with none of the messy life that powered Goodfellas or Donnie Brasco.

The double De Niro conceit is pure marketing, and it shows. Scene after scene leans on split screens and editing tricks, hoping viewers will marvel at the digital wizardry rather than notice the lifeless dialogue.

Audiences deserve more from Levinson, Pileggi, and especially De Niro. They once elevated this genre; here, they cheapen it.

The movie ends, the lights rise, and you wonder — with two De Niros, how did they make a film with no pulse?

One De Niro would have been plenty, if only they’d given him a story worth telling.

Who can Hollywood still villainize?

It’s a question worth asking.

Every era of filmmaking has leaned on certain “safe” villains. In the ’30s and ’40s, it was Axis soldiers. The ’50s leaned on communists. The ’70s and ’80s often made street criminals and minorities the face of evil. The ’90s favored Arab terrorists. For decades, it was understood—sometimes openly, sometimes quietly—who it was okay to demonize on screen.

That map has changed.

Today’s Hollywood walks a tighter wire. The global box office matters more than ever. Audiences are more diverse, more vocal, more sensitive to stereotypes. Studios, facing both social pressure and international markets, tread carefully when choosing villains.

Who’s off the table?

Racial minorities. Audiences won’t tolerate stereotypes without critique. Arab villains, largely avoided. Muslim characters, written with care or sidestepped entirely.

LGBTQ characters are no longer cast as coded villains. Religious groups are tricky—cults or abusive leaders may be fair game, but not broad portrayals of faith.

Foreign nationals? Studios covet the Chinese market, so Chinese villains have vanished. Russians still show up, but often as rogue agents, not national stereotypes.

So who’s left?

The ultra-rich. Corrupt billionaires and tech moguls are open targets. Films like Glass Onion and series like Succession skewer the elite with relish.

Corporations and CEOs remain reliable antagonists. Avatar, Don’t Look Up, Iron Man 3—all frame corporations as engines of greed and destruction.

Nazis are a perennial fallback. No one protests their depiction. Franchises like Indiana Jones and Captain America are built on it.

Human traffickers, serial killers, and terrorists—provided they’re written as individuals, not as broad groups—remain common. Think Taken.

Corrupt government figures thrive in thrillers. Mission Impossible, Bourne, Jack Ryan, and Homeland continue to mine this ground.

Aliens, robots, and supernatural forces provide clean, uncontroversial conflict. The Terminator, A Quiet Place, Transformers, Marvel’s cosmic villains—all work here.

White supremacists and domestic extremists appear more frequently, particularly in prestige TV. BlacKkKlansman, Justified, and Law & Order: Organized Crime go there.

What’s most common now is the systemic villain. The enemy isn’t a person. It’s corruption. It’s capitalism. It’s the system.

Sometimes this works. Parasite used class tension as its engine. The Big Short exposed systemic rot with sharp teeth.

But often it breeds sameness. Another greedy CEO. Another evil algorithm. Another faceless senator.

Villains need to evolve as audiences do. The trick is keeping them human, fresh, and sharp.

Because the worst thing a villain can be isn’t offensive.

It’s boring.

Deadline.

That’s the engine that drives September 5, a tense, disciplined film about the Munich Olympics hostage crisis—and the scramble inside an American newsroom to cover it in real time.

Directed by Tim Fehlbaum, the movie never leaves its chosen frame: the ABC Sports control room in Munich. Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), an experienced producer, finds himself reporting on a terrorist attack, not a sporting event. Alongside him: network president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), operations chief Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), and translator Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch).

The decision to keep the film anchored inside the newsroom is a smart one. There are no cutaways to politicians, no staged shots of the gunmen. The tension builds through headset chatter, garbled wire reports, and a dawning realization that no one—not the broadcasters, not the authorities—knows what’s actually happening.

Historically, September 5 holds its ground. The filmmakers drew from ABC archives and consulted surviving staffers.

The infamous false report that the hostages had been rescued—a mistake broadcast to millions—happened exactly as depicted. The pressure on the network to “get something on the air” is also drawn from the record. Where the film condenses or imagines, it does so in service of tone, not distortion.

The parallels to All the President’s Men and Network are inevitable, but September 5 charts its own course. It is less about institutional power than professional panic. It is not about triumph, nor satire. It’s about uncertainty, and how newsrooms operate when no one knows what is true.

The cast serves the material. Magaro plays Mason as a man whose calm is cracking. Sarsgaard’s Arledge is more calculating. And Benesch gives the film its conscience, translating not just words, but the mounting dread in the room.

September 5 does not glorify journalism. It shows it for what it often is in moments of crisis: a flawed, human effort to catch up to a world already spinning out of control.