Casino Reviews

Elegy for the apogee of the mob

Las Vegas has never looked more beautiful or more seductive as we are lead through more than a decade of the rise and fall of the mafia empire in the desert. This is not a sanitisation. There is extreme violence. But even that is unforgettably staged and photographed.

It is a long film, nearly 3 hours, but it never slackens its grip for a moment. This is all the more extraordinary an achievement, given that there's so much story it is crammed into voiceover, or rather two strands of variably reliable voiceover.

Sharon Stone won an Oscar for her portrayal of Ginger, the casino boss's wife and sometime hooker, but there's not a bad performance in it. Every character, though at best venial, is so sharply realised you care about them.

In my book this exceeds The Godfather.

The con goes on...

Did I fail to press the wrong 'play select' button here?

Another film where the film is secondary to the constant stream of text rolling under the film. I am not doing a course on film studies, I want only to be entertained. The screen play size was further reduced by the text box, written in that annoying self important ,american overfamiliar, pseudo informative style.

I am great fan of 'world' films and the english dialogue format is pivotal to my enjoyment.

The last film I 'watched' in Casino style was Triston and Isolde .

I lasted less than 3 minutes this time so am unable say how marvellous the the iconc actors were.

Will someone let me know if I could 'deselect 'such babble? or did I miss the point? If I want to read i'll get a book, please Mr Producer just let me watch your film!

[Highly rated reviewer]

Casino

Martin Scorsese has made plenty of good films in the last decade but Casino is his last (to date) truly great film. Often underrated as it is made to live in the shadow of Goodfellas Casino is ripe for re-evaluation. The performances are impeccable DeNiro is masterful as Ace, once again vanishing within the character (and his hideous suits). Pesci, ever underpraised, is mersmerically brilliant as Nicky and Sharon Stone shows acting chops few ever suspected she had. Even the support is wonderful from Kevin Pollack to Don 'Mr Potato Head' Rickles it's class all the way. Marty excels himself with the whole film packed with memorable images and brilliant use of devices like freeze frames, voiceover and music. Casino shouldn't be seen, as I think it sometimes is, as Goodfellas poor relation, it's at least as good a film.

This is an 18

This film was not for me.

This was one of those films which was offered as a recomendation, and I do like De Nero, but I was put off by such bad language - almost every other word, which I thought was unnessecary - I should not have taken up this offer and I thought you may also want to know.

sharp clothing, great music, inventive yarn spinning, Joe Pesci violence, astonishing directorial prowess

Martin Scorsese, one of America's most influential filmmakers, returns to the world of mobsters, greed, and excess that he explored so compellingly in 1990?s GOODFELLAS. Set in the 1970s and reveling in the minute details of how Las Vegas casinos operate, the film chronicles the rise and fall of casino manager Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro). As the king of his domain, Ace efficiently runs the business and regularly sends lots of cold cash to his bosses. Helping him keep the casino's employees and customers honest is his best friend, Nicky (Joe Pesci), a violent sociopath. Although Ace aims to run a relatively respectable casino, the volatile Nicky wants to take over the entire gambling mecca, and when Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone), a seasoned Vegas hustler, enters the picture, Ace and Nicky's friendship is complicated even further. As drugs and alcohol become a bigger part of Ginger's life, all three are eventually brought down by their own greed and blind ambition. CASINO shares many similarities with GOODFELLAS, beginning with a script that was cowritten by Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi. Regulars De Niro and Pesci are first rate once again as the dissimilar companions, but it is Stone who steals the show with her grueling, intense performance.

The godfather of ganster movies

In Martin Scorsece's hit 'mafia' film, depicting the rise and fall of group of mobsters in Las Vegas. Rob Deniro and Joe Peschi give top notch performances as the lead mobsters running the Tangiers casino in Vegas. In the first half we are shown how Deniro's character tightly operates his casino. He knows all the tricks in the books that hustlers try to pull, however no one can pull a one up on this guy. Peschi is his hit man who does most of the dirty work, but is eventually banned from all casinos. Turning in a fiery, top notch (Oscar nomination) performance is Sharon Stone as a drug hustler who enchants Deniro one day as she shows up at the casino. They marry and he hopes to 'make' him fall in love with her one day, because her true love is a pimp (played by James Wood). Needless to say the last hour or so of this movie is vicious as we see the FBI crackdown on all the schemes the mobsters were trying so hard to hide in the casinos. Stone and Peschi, in particular have brutal demises. Extreme profanity, violence, and partial nudity ? a great mix. Excellent acting, direction, plot, and soundtrack.

Vegas Bloody Vegas

What a cast - De Nero, Pesci, Stone fantastic - Stone is totally brilliant first glamourous and later ffffd up. De Nero is awesome cold and calculating and Pesci is an evil little b'stard, who at one stage gives a look that would freeze your blood. This is just an amazing film about the 'old' Las Vegas before the big corporations money took over. This is the murderous, beat the cheats in a backroom and bury bodies in the desert, Vegas and it is portrayed perfectly a real feeling of malice runs through the film.

Casino

Great film, interesting storyline, great characters and a great ending to finish the film off. Would recommend to anyone interested in this genre.

Casino Royale (with Cheese)

From the opening montage of Casino - a visual onslaught of cinematic pyrotechnics from one of America's modern cinematic masters - it is clear that we are in for a gloriously bumpy ride. The opening titles (by the legendary Saul Bass of Vertigo fame), in which De Niro's character is seen hurtling through space, sets the lavish scene for a movie full of shysters, criminals and thugs to come. And yet, after the first thirty minutes of whiplash camera moves, stylised violence and slick but unlikely dialogue, you soon begin to wonder where's the beef? Scorcese must have been thinking the same thing, as it is about then that he starts to unwind the apparent heart of the movie, in the form of the relationship that develops (slightly) between De Niro and Sharon Stone's characters. However much that he plugs away at it though, this love story - set deliberately against the corrupting effects of a life of greed and corruption - never really produces a spark that burns even remotely like love. The beauty and craft of Casino lays instead in the set-piece violence, including the infamous 'head in vice' scene and the brutal (but convincing) scene in which Joe Pesci and his brother 'buy it' in the desert. These moments are tough to watch and seem excessive perhaps and yet within them lays the truth of what the Las Vegas mob (or Las Vegas itself) really was - a bunch of thugs looking for luck in the desert and who both showed nor received any mercy when it came time to pay the house. There is truth and beauty in this most exciting of movies, even if it is too heavily dependent upon the visual element at the expense of the characters. De Niro is however, at times, both haunting and sublime (maybe for the last time ever in his career?). The final shot of his character, looking out from the melancholy and jaded perch of his retirement, conjures up images of his enigmatic smile at the close of 'Once Upon a Time in America' - a comparison that points further to the status of Casino as a flawed but nevertheless essential modern American epic. By the way, I meant to give this film four stars, not five.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Pesci and Stone star but it's too long

When this first come out I don't think it was really classed as a masterpiece but recent revisionism has seen this get very high ratings but I think people were right first time around. The direction, as you would expect was first rate but to me the film drags too much in the second half of the film. About 45 minutes too long, it ain't no Goodfellas although Joe Pesci and Sharon Stone turn in career performances