The Many Saints of Newark (2021)

I do wonder how well someone who has never seen an episode of The Sopranos would follow this movie. As a fan of the television series, this prequel offered quite a bit for me. The film offers the rise and fall of Dickie Moltisanti, setting him up for better and much worse as the mentor of Tony Soprano. Set during the 1967 Newark riots, there’s quite a bit of retconning done to pull in as many references as possible to the original series. This is also done with a number of the characters from the series, shoehorning caricatures of well-known characters into roles that could have better been filled by different personalities. The narration of a ghostly Christopher Moltisanti is rather unnecessary and overly explains things that are already being shown. There were many bright spots, mostly in roles where the actors didn’t try to overly copy their predecessors (Vera Farmiga as Livia, William Ludwig and Michael Gandolfini as young Tonys, Corey Stoll as Junior) but I think it all could have been best served as a limited series.