It isn’t just the echoing moments that keep you absorbed. It’s those reverberant dreamland settings and Leone’s majestic, billowing sense of film movement; the images seem to come at you in waves of feeling.

The movie's four hours long, but no one had the time to write a single real character.

This would-be epic schlep, dragging almost 50 years of chronology over a sluggish 140 minutes, is far too slight of text and ponderous of presentation to sustain more than nodding-off dramatic interest.

epic crime film and it takes you through so many different eras with these characters