Casino (1995)

Here's the thing about Casino: I went in half-expecting to feel like I'd already seen it. I'd done Goodfellas, I'd done The Godfather, I'd done LA Confidential. I thought I had the measure of this kind of film. I was wrong, and I'm glad I was.

Scorsese drops you into Las Vegas and barely lets you breathe for the next three hours. The city itself isn't just a backdrop here. It pulses and glitters and rots in equal measure, all neon excess on the surface and something genuinely nasty underneath. It feels alive in the way that great settings always do, the kind where you can almost smell the stale cigarette smoke and cheap cologne drifting off the casino floor. That texture is everywhere, and it makes the whole film feel grounded even when the behaviour on screen is completely off the rails.

De Niro is doing what De Niro does best: controlled, precise, a man who believes in systems and order in a world that refuses to cooperate. He's excellent. Sharon Stone, though, is something else entirely. There's a rawness and unpredictability to her performance that I didn't see coming, and she more than holds her own against two of the most formidable screen presences of their generation. She deserved every bit of recognition she got for it.

But Joe Pesci. Good lord, Joe Pesci. If you've seen Gangs of New York (2002) you'll know Scorsese has always had a gift for surrounding his leads with volatile, scene-stealing energy, but Pesci here might be the definitive version of that instinct. Every single scene he appears in carries a charge. You're watching him and you genuinely don't know what he's about to do, and that uncertainty is terrifying in the best possible way. He's unhinged, magnetic, and completely convincing. He doesn't feel like a character being performed. He feels like a threat.

Yes, it's long. Nearly three hours, and Scorsese doesn't exactly sprint through the runtime. But I'd push back on anyone who calls it bloated, because the length is doing real work. You need that time to watch the whole edifice rise and then crumble. The excess of the film mirrors the excess of the world it's depicting. By the time it starts to fall apart for these people, you feel the weight of everything they built and lost, because you sat through the building of it. That's not self-indulgence. That's craft.

It's also, in stretches, brutally violent in ways that feel genuinely jarring rather than stylised for effect. Scorsese doesn't let you get comfortable. The glamour and the brutality are right next to each other the whole time, which is sort of the point. This is what it actually costs, the film keeps saying. This is what's underneath the chandeliers.

I've come back to it more than once since that first watch, and it rewards the revisit. Details you missed the first time snap into focus. Performances you admired become even richer when you know where everything is headed. That replayability is one of the surest signs of a film that's doing something genuinely substantial rather than just making a lot of noise.

Scorsese has made films I admire in different ways, and I wrote about one of his more unsettling earlier efforts when I covered Cape Fear, but Casino sits right at the top of his crime work for me. Brutal, stylish, endlessly watchable. It surprised me, and at this point in my film-watching life, that's no small thing.

Four and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 1995  | Watched: 2025-04-15

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Martin Scorsese: Italianamerican (1974) · The King of Comedy (1982) · Gangs of New York (2002) · Cape Fear (1991)
More with Robert De Niro: The Untouchables (1987) · The King of Comedy (1982) · Shark Tale (2004) · Little Fockers (2010)
More from France: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)