A Bronx Tale is a very funny movie sometimes, and very touching at other times. It is filled with life and colorful characters and great lines of dialogue, and De Niro, in his debut as a director, finds the right notes as he moves from laughter to anger to tears. What's important about the film is that it's about values.

De Niro successfully varies the tone, keeping it light and playful at times, dark and somber at others. A Bronx Tale is his triumph, and a testimony that all those years of watching the best in the business have borne fruit. If what is yet to come has any of the promise shown by this debut, we may be witnessing the birth of yet another directing talent.

He lacks Scorsese's raw inventiveness, but there's no denying De Niro's skill in keeping this pungent street epic brimming over with action and laughs without sacrificing intimacy. He is a supreme director of actors.

Instead of ladling on the Scorsese sauce, Robert De Niro's Bronx accent is on semisweet nostalgia. He presents a domestic drama spiced with humor about a boy torn between his working-stiff dad (De Niro in fine regular-fella mode) and Chazz Palminteri's easy-money ways. De Niro doesn't let arty camera angles sub for good storytelling. And he draws memorable performances from two amazing young, new actors. [01 Oct 1993, p. 8D]

Surprisingly sentimental by turns, this emerges not as just another gangster initiation movie, but as a story of father and son love with enough guts to hold those anticipating the former, while also touching the heart.