As someone who was worried this would be overlong, it could easily have been longer. Not a wasted minute really
This was so good. There was a point around the Kennedy/Cuba stuff where I was worried I would get a little bored but man. The last hour or so of this was really incredible. The CGI bothered me a bit, not just the faces but the blood. I hate how CGI blood looks
The CGI blood on Sally Bugs was particularly distracting. As far as what I’d cut? Honestly not too sure. I know I’m in the minority here.
Man Bronson really took me out of it for a second. Knew he was in it but it was still jarring for a second
Everything after Hoffa dies is sublime and you can’t cut a second of it, and it needs everything before it to balance well
I really can't think of a second that I would cut, and I know this was already mentioned many times by other people, but I could even see adding some time to give Anna Paquin more than 2 lines / 6 words and flesh out her character a little more, get to see the situation from her character's side even just the tiniest bit. Also, not that I am vouching for this thing to be 7 hours long, but I came away feeling like I could watch Joe Pesci on screen as Buffalino for easily 3½ more hours and not be bored. What a sublime and captivating performance.
Paquin is so great in this, and there’s plenty of criticism online of how little she’s in it, but in her limited presence her performance weighs even more and leaning too far into her perspective risks overly moralizing. She’s perfect, as she has been in basically everything since Margaret
I think Paquin not speaking much is the point? She’s almost like God watching and silently judging Frank.
Jesse Plemons also barely speaks so it was less egregious but generally speaking I get why people are kinda sick of movies where female characters are only wives or daughters which this certainly was, but nothing against this particularly just an annoying trope
more than anyone else in this, i was truly shocked to find out Pacino still had this in him also, de niro’s blue eyes took me out more than the cgi lmao
The only scene that was jarring to me was when De Niro beats that guy in the grocery store. That looked awkward as hell
The CGI de-aging worked fine for me. I noticed it at first, the same way I noticed Mahershala Ali and Stephen Dorff had old man makeup on for their old man scenes in True Detective Season 3, but I was able to just go with the story immediately. Having a character portrayed over time periods that are decades apart is always a tough proposition and I don't believe there is a clear best solution. I know when an entirely different actor is cast my brain will sometimes pick apart how different the two actors actually look. The two scenes for me where the seams really showed were the grocery store beating you mention here, and also where De Niro's character climbs over and down some rocks to throw a gun into the river. Him gingerly climbing over the rocks very clearly looks like the movement of a 76 year old man. There were a few random scenes where the CGI faces would look a little odd, but as other people have mentioned, De Niro's Fremen-like blue eyes and the CGI blood were far more distracting than the digital de-aging on the whole.