Casino

“This story has to be on a big canvas. There’s no sense in my getting Bob De Niro and Joe Pesci and making a 90-minute picture about only one aspect of one story out of Vegas for the past 40 years. It has to be set in the context of time and place, it has to be about America. Otherwise, why make another mob story?” — Martin Scorsese

Revisiting the wise guy milieu for the third (but not the final) time, Scorsese tells the story of Ace Rothstein and Nicky Santoro (Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci), two New York hoodlums who become major players in the history of Las Vegas.

Brilliant, but ungiving, Casino looks like self-rebuke, a violent recoil from the exhilarating amoral rush of Scorsese’s most popular film, GoodFellas. Casino is altogether more objective — the first hour delineates the organization of crime with an almost documentary rigour — and less enamoured of its self-destructive wise guys. At the time Scorsese was widely perceived to be treading water, but now, Casino looks the more probing work, the American epic he knew he had inside him. Here the sociological detail is married to a more coherent moral vision of tragic hubris and iniquity. Tip of the hat, too, to Sharon Stone, who more than holds her own in the film’s pivotal love (or power) triangle.

Staff Pick: Brittany

Jul 29: Intro by Sean Wicks, VFX Production

It’s a Scorsese masterpiece. [Seeing it again] I was mesmerized from the opening moments… that hypnotic quality didn’t ebb away. I sat there revited, the entire movie. It’s Scorsese’s most pitiless reckoning of the wages of sin.

Owen Gleiberman, Variety

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