Casino Review

The first hour is a procedural about money, and it is the best thing here. Scorsese films the count room, the skim, the eye in the sky and the hierarchy of who gets to touch cash with a documentary patience, and the twin narration keeps explaining a system rather than a plot. Robert Richardson lights it in gold and hard top-light so the floor looks like a cathedral built for a vice. Sharon Stone is the film: Ginger arrives as pure appetite and disintegrates over two hours without ever asking to be forgiven, and it is the only performance here that surprises.

De Niro plays Ace as a man of lists, deliberately narrow, and Joe Pesci is doing a louder version of a part he had already perfected. That is the limit. The shape is Goodfellas again, the rise, the excess, the unravelling, with the same freeze frames and needle drops, and at 178 minutes the middle sags in a way the earlier film never does. The violence in the last act is punishing rather than revealing. Superbly made, slightly redundant, and worth it for the tradecraft and for Stone.