Critics reviews

Goodfellas is a nervy blast—nostalgia-soaked, endlessly quotable, and oddly fun even as it grinds toward a tragic drug-addled end. Casino, both chillier and more hothouse by turns, nauseatingly violent and deeply, woefully sad, is no one's idea of a good time... Casino looks so much more trenchant to me two decades on. If it almost feels like a different movie, it may be because it was more prescient than we could have known.

As Sam "Ace" Rothstein, Robert De Niro gives one of his most poignant performances in Martin Scorsese's ultra-violent, epic and underrated Casino, a movie that feels richer, more nuanced more masterful each time you watch it.

It presents the rare, inspiring sight of a director pushing his capacities, obsessions, and stylistic experimentation to the limit. Scorsese's attempts to shunt narrative and explore worlds through montage and voiceover, to fuse high and low culture, to gain panoramic insight into America, to show violence as harsh and ugly as possible

My choice of best and most underrated film of the decade has to be Martin Scorsese's sublime, misunderstood Casino – a sprawling, overreaching mess in some ways, but the nearest that recent US cinema has come to producing a ‘how-we-live-today' statement of the Zola school.

Scorsese's movie is technically impressive. There's even something inherently fascinating about the subject - the way Las Vegas, and the organised criminals who run it, have changed over the last couple of decades. What's wrong is the approach: virtuosity seems almost to have become an end in itself... Scorsese's dazzling, kinetic technique calls attention to itself so persistently that story and characters retreat into the background.

It deals with the 70s after the 60s of GoodFellas, finding Las Vegas an ideal microcosm of that decade's false glamour. Yes also, insofar as Scorsese and Pileggi have mined another rich vein of America's grim history of organised crime and revel insolently in their findings. But it's also darker, more complex and more ambitious.

None of this is very fresh or interesting as a subject, though it's promising as a form of narration, with Sam and Nicky's voices occasionally interacting, and Scorsese's usual flurry of hyped-up camera moves jiggling the visual accompaniment like a cocktail shaker. But then the air slowly leaks out of this vehicle's tires, and we're left with a story we've heard many times before and with familiar characters who are even less interesting than usual.

Beginning with an explosion whose shockwaves expand across time and space like a narrative Big Bang, Casino is Scorsese's Gotterdammerung, a blistering and haunting last word on the culture of American violence, criminal enterprise, and civic life that he's mined since Mean Streets.