Director Barry Levinson's lengthy family epic - a sort of Godfather without guns - is saved from schmaltz by a wonderfully assured and generous performance by Armin Mueller-Stahl. He plays Sam Krichinsky, the head of an immigrant clan who arrives in America on 4 July, 1914. Four generations of family loving and feuding follow, with the bulk of the film taking place just after the Second World War. While Joan Plowright and Elizabeth Perkins are featured, it's primarily a movie about men, though everyone is so talkily eloquent they eventually become tiresome.

A Polish-Jewish family comes to the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century. There, the family and their children try to make themselves a better future in the so-called promised land.