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The Alto Knights review: Double Robert De Niro deserves better than the speedrun treatment
The promise of Robert De Niro playing not one but two infamous gangsters might enough to tempt fans of Goodfellas or the Godfather trilogy into seeing The Alto Knights. But be warned. While the promise of double De Niro is tempting, the movie itself is inexplicable.
On paper, The Alto Knights sounds terrific. The real-life story of Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, two childhood friends turned rival Mob bosses, is peppered with the classic elements of gangster movies, from macho face-offs, sharp-tongued wives, vicious betrayals, a criminal conspiracy, and merciless, violent murder. Who better to draft such an adapted screenplay than Nicholas Pileggi, the author and co-screenwriter behind Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas and Casino? And who better to headline than recurring Scorsese collaborator/iconic tough guy Robert De Niro?
However, director Barry Levinson (Sleepers, Dope Thief) makes some absolutely befuddling choices in The Alto Knights. The potential promised by its talent is squandered in a completely confounding gangster flick.
Why is Robert De Niro playing two characters in The Alto Knights?
From the start, Vito Genovese and Frank Costello are depicted as very different kinds of gangsters, though they share a similar origin. These Italian immigrants became friends as young men, hanging around the Alto Knights Social Club in 1910s New York City. Associates of the notorious Lucky Luciano, both made their way in the city through criminal enterprises. However, by the 1930s, it was Genovese who was chosen to run the Family — that is, until a double-homicide investigation chased him back to Italy. Before he left, Genovese handed the reigns to his trusted friend, Costello, expecting to resume control upon his return.
However, in the intervening decades, Costello's leadership of the Mob was so successful that on top of becoming obscenely rich, he'd made enough political connections to achieve a sheen of respectability. In The Alto Knights, Frank is a suave philanthropist who attends glamorous charity balls with his wife Bobbie (Debra Messing), a chic Jewish socialite, on his arm. Meanwhile, Vito is a more Scorsese kind of gangster — close to the streets, gnawing on a cigar, spitting out threats and curse words with equal ease. His wife is a sultry Italian divorcée (Kathrine Narducci) that runs her nightclub with passion and a big mouth.
Frank is the kind of smooth criminal De Niro has played before in films like Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon, where his affluence and polite veneer hide an ocean of sins. Vito is more mercurial, the kind of primed-for-eruption character De Niro played in Taxi Driver or Goodfellas. So there's a curious experiment in having the octogenarian actor attempt to straddle this range of representation that he's managed across decades, all in one film.
Masterfully applied prosthetics distinguish Frank from Vito, as do the voices De Niro uses for them. Frank is more traditionally De Niro, with a low, husky, alert but world-weary delivery. Vito is higher pitched and sharper in cadence; frankly, it feels like a Joe Pesci impersonation. But there are enough shared physicalities in both stride and facial expressions — especially in a couple of scenes where the characters face off — that this double-casting feels like a stunt that doesn't pay off. It's just obvious it's the same guy, but why is less clear.
Perhaps Levinson couldn't decide which role his Wag the Dog collaborator would be best in and so went for both. Maybe he thought this dual-casting would build a message about these mafiosos, something along the lines of how far they grew apart from their common past — sort of a "there but for the grace of God go I" kind of a thing. However, if that were the case, you'd think Levinson would do the same for the flashbacks, casting the same actor to play both Young Frank and Young Vito. Instead, Luke Stanton Eddy and Antonio Cipriano play these roles, respectively, but even calling them roles feels like a stretch considering their screen time. Astonishingly, The Alto Knights engages less with flashbacks than it does with black-and-white staged photographs intercut with archival B-roll and egregious voiceover that barrels over everything.
The Alto Knights feels like a gangster movie with zero patience for its own story.
It is a truth universally accepted that gangster movies are allowed to be long. Goodfellas is two hours and 26 minutes. Casino is two hours and 58 minutes. The Godfather Part II is three hours and 22 minutes. Sure, some might grouse, but overall it's understood: That time is required not only to properly unravel the secretive lives and complicated criminal conspiracies of its anti-heroes, but also to allow audiences to experience the intoxicating confidence of being a mobster. For instance, the Goodfellas' long take winding through the Copacabana on Henry and Karen's first date allows us to walk in the gait of a gangster, experiencing the access, the power, and the thrill. Filmmakers need pace and time to build the intoxicating atmosphere that makes murder feel like an understandable trade-off.
By sharp contrast, The Alto Knights races through its story with a cluttered and haphazard structure that seems to predict audience restlessness, and instead causes it. For instance, the movie opens in media res, with the 1957 attempted hit on Frank Costello. Then, a voiceover from a calm Frank begins to explain what happened next and why the attempted murder happened at all. While you might be wondering if Frank is telling his story from beyond the grave, Levinson leaps to setting up who Frank and Vito are to each other through boring montages of the aforementioned B-roll and uninspired black-and-white flashbacks. It's a dizzying and dull structure that talks down to the audience instead of welcoming them in.
Voiceover can be compelling in a gangster movie, as Goodfellas proved. But here, it seems De Niro is given a third role — not so much as narrator but as a spackler trying earnestly to patch together the broken bits of this story into something sensible. Levinson's gratuitous use of voiceover papers over decades of important events and grisly homicides with little in the passing visuals to land their gravity.
Worse yet, Levinson — or perhaps Pileggi — becomes fixated on cross-cutting sequences, however unmotivated. Ideally, cutting from one situation to the other and back again would increase tension, showing how one incident will impact the other or paralleling how two characters have a shared point of impending threat. But in The Alto Knights, these crosscuts feel less about their relationships and more like the editor was told to trim 20 minutes from the film, whatever it took. So, gone are breaths, beats, and atmosphere. What's left is a gangster movie that feels forcefully sped up, causing little of its blows to land successfully. Which, considering the failed hit on Frank at the film's start, might be darkly fitting!
To Pileggi's credit, he crafts monologues that harken back to the greatness of Goodfellas and Casino, elucidating from Frank and Vito's perspectives the self-preservation aspect of the Italian Mafia in America. Surrounded by bigotry and rejection, the Mob was built to protect their own. However, while this argument's weak points has room to be explored in his previous films, The Alto Knights gives little more lip service to these ideas, leaning hard on De Niro's performance as the movie's structure crumbles around him. He is bolstered by a strong supporting cast, including Messing as Frank's shrewd wife, Narducci as Vito's volatile lover, The Sopranos' Matt Servitto as a frustrated Mob lawyer, Death to Smoochy's Michael Rispoli as a fired-up Frank loyalist, and Shōgun's Cosmo Jarvis as an easily flustered minion of Vito's. However, these engaging performances can't save The Alto Knights from sinking under the weight of Levinson's confounding direction.
In the long run, The Alto Knights will likely be remembered fondly as a bold risk for its central casting gambit. But considering the masterful storytellers involved here and the muddle of a Mafia movie that came from them, it's impossible to imagine The Alto Knights will be known for much more than its big swing and a bigger miss.
The Alto Knights opens in theaters March 21.
Windows users should think about reinforcing their antivirus software. And while Microsoft Defender should provide a line of defense against ransomware, a new report claims that hackers have found a way to get around the ransomware tool to infect PCs with ransomware.
A GuidePoint Security report (via BleepingComputer) found that hackers are using Akira ransomware to exploit a legitimate PC driver to load a second, malicious driver that shuts off Windows Defender, allowing for all sorts of monkey business.
The good driver that's being exploited here is called "rwdrv.sys,' which is used for tuning software for Intel CPUs. Hackers abuse it to install "hlpdrv.sys," another driver that they then use to get around Defender — and start doing whatever it is they want to do.
GuidePoint reported seeing this type of attack starting in the middle of July. It doesn't seem like the loophole has been patched yet, but the more people know about it, the less likely it is for the exploit to work against them, at least in theory.
In the meantime, allow our colleagues at PCMag to recommend some fine third-party antivirus software to you for your Windows PC. For more information on the latest Akira ransomware attacks — including possible defenses — head to GuidePoint Security.
GPT-5 is out, the early reviews are in, and they're not great.
Many ChatGPT fans have taken to Reddit and other social media platforms to express their frustration and disappointment with OpenAI's newest foundation model, released on Thursday.
A quick glimpse of the ChatGPT subreddit (which is not affiliated with OpenAI) shows scathing reviews of GPT-5. Since the model began rolling out, the subreddit has filled with posts calling GPT-5 a "disaster," "horrible," and the "biggest piece of garbage even as a paid user."
Awkwardly, Altman and other members of the OpenAI team had a preplanned Reddit AMA to answer questions about GPT-5. In the hours ahead of the AMA, questions piled up in anticipation, with many users demanding that OpenAI bring back GPT-4o as an alternative to GPT-5.
What Redditors are saying about GPT-5
Many of the negative first impressions say GPT-5 lacks the "personality" of GPT-4o, citing colder, shorter replies. "GPT-4o had this… warmth. It was witty, creative, and surprisingly personal, like talking to someone who got you. It didn’t just spit out answers; it felt like it listened," said one redditor. "Now? Everything’s so… sterile."
Another said, "GPT-5 lacks the essence and soul that separated Chatgpt (sic) from other AI bots. I sincerely wish they bring back 4o as a legacy model or something like that."
Several redditors also criticized the fact that OpenAI did away with the option to choose different models, prompting some users to say they're canceling their subscriptions. "I woke up this morning to find that OpenAI deleted 8 models overnight. No warning. No choice. No "legacy option," posted one redditor who said they deleted their ChatGPT Plus account. Another user posted that they canceled their account for the same reason.
As Mashable reported yesterday, GPT-5 integrates various OpenAI models into one platform, and ChatGPT will now choose the appropriate model based on the user's prompt. Clearly, some users miss the old system and models.
Ironically, OpenAI has also drawn criticism for having too many model options; GPT-5 was supposed to resolve this confusion by streamlining the previous models under GPT-5.
Sam Altman responds to the criticisms
When Altman and the team logged onto the AMA, they faced a barrage of demands to bring back GPT-4o.
"Ok, we hear you all on 4o," said Altman during the AMA. "Thanks for the time to give us the feedback (and the passion!). We are going to bring it back for Plus users, and will watch usage to determine how long to support it."
Altman also addressed feedback that GPT-5 seemed dumber than it should have been, explaining that the "autoswitcher" that determines which version of GPT-5 to use wasn't working. "GPT-5 will seem smarter starting today," he said. Altman also added that the chatbot will make it clearer which model is answering a user's prompt. OpenAI will double rate limits for ChatGPT Plus users once the rollout is finished.
“As we mentioned, we expected some bumpiness as we roll out so many things at once. But it was a little more bumpy than we hoped for!” Altman said in the AMA.
GPT-5 is an improvement, but not an exponential one
Expectations for GPT-5 could not have been higher — and that may be the real problem with GPT-5.
Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and author known for his research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence — and a well-known skeptic of the AI hype machine — wrote on his Substack that GPT-5 makes “Good progress on many fronts” but disappoints in others. Marcus noted that even after multi-billion-dollar investments, “GPT-5 is not the huge leap forward people long expected.”
The last time OpenAI released a frontier model was over two years ago with GPT-4. Since then, several competitors like Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, xAI's Grok, Meta's Llama, and DeepSeek R1 have caught up to OpenAI on benchmarks, similar agentic features, and user loyalty. For many, GPT-5 had the power to reinforce or topple OpenAI's reign as the AI leader.
With this in mind, it's inevitable that some users would be disappointed, and many ChatGPT users have shared positive reviews of GPT-5 as well. Time may blunt these criticisms as OpenAI makes improvements and tweaks to GPT-5. The company has also historically been responsive to user feedback, with Altman being very active on X.
"We currently believe the best way to successfully navigate AI deployment challenges is with a tight feedback loop of rapid learning and careful iteration," the company's mission statement avows.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
UPDATE: Aug. 8, 2025, 3:20 p.m. EDT This story has been updated with Sam Altman's responses from the Reddit AMA.
YouTube is officially rolling out its AI-assisted age verification next week to catch users who lie about their age.
YouTube announced in late July that it would start using artificial intelligence for age verification. And this week, 9to5Google reported that the new system will go into effect on Aug. 13.
The new system will "help provide the best and most age-appropriate experiences and protections," according to YouTube.
"Over the next few weeks, we’ll begin to roll out machine learning to a small set of users in the US to estimate their age, so that teens are treated as teens and adults as adults," wrote James Beser, Director of Product Management with YouTube Youth, in a blog post. "We’ll closely monitor this before we roll it out more widely. This technology will allow us to infer a user’s age and then use that signal, regardless of the birthday in the account, to deliver our age-appropriate product experiences and protections."
"We’ve used this approach in other markets for some time, where it is working well," Beser added.
The AI interprets a "variety of signals" to determine a user's age, including "the types of videos a user is searching for, the categories of videos they have watched, or the longevity of the account." If the system determines that a user is a teen, it will automatically apply age-appropriate experiences and protections. If the system incorrectly determines a user's age, the user will have to verify that they're over 18 with a government ID or credit card.
This comes at a time in which age verification efforts are ramping up across the world — and not without controversy. As Wired reported, when the UK began requiring residents to verify their ages before watching porn as part of the Online Safety Act, users immediately started using VPNs to get around the law.
Some platforms use face scanning or IDs, which can be easily faked. As generative AI gets more sophisticated, so will the ability to work around age verification tools. And, as Mashable previously reported, users are reasonably wary of giving too much of their private information to companies because of security breaches, as in the recent Tea app leak.
In theory, as Wired also reported, "age verification serves to keep kids safer." But, in reality, "the systems being put into place are flawed ones, both from a privacy and protection standpoint."
Samir Jain, vice president of policy at the nonprofit Center for Democracy & Technology, told the Associated Press that age verification requirements "raise serious privacy and free expression concerns," including the "potential to upend access to First Amendment-protected speech on the internet for everyone, children and adults alike."
"If states are to go forward with these burdensome laws, age verification tools must be accurate and limit collection, sharing, and retention of personal information, particularly sensitive information like birthdate and biometric data," Jain told the news outlet.
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