“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
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
Media Partner
Martin Scorsese
Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, Sharon Stone, James Woods
USA
1995
English
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits
Producer
Barbara De Fina
Screenwriter
Nicholas Pileggi, Martin Scorsese
Cinematography
Robert Richardson
Editor
Thelma Schoonmaker
Production Design
Dante Ferretti
90s, Baby!
Ten years. 11 weeks. 90 films from the 1990s. This summer, 90’s Baby! takes a deep dive into a defining decade of cinema.
Unforgiven
Bill Munny (Clint Eastwood) is face down in pig shit when we first see him. He's a bad farmer, but has a natural facility for killing people – a vocation to which he returns in a quest that combines both profit and justice. Or so he chooses to believe.
Malcolm X
In an indelible role, Denzel Washington give us a layered, compassionate, conflicted man who finds the strength in Islam to transcend his demons and confront the inequity and racism in America head-on. Along with Do the Right Thing, this is Spike Lee's greatest film.
Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
A bona fide classic and arguably the greatest Canadian film of the 90s, Girard's dazzling deconstruction of the biopic gives us the mercurial pianist Glenn Gould as Picasso might have rendered him, a cubist portrait combining multimedia vignettes.
Dazed and Confused
The last day of high school in May, 1976: seniors debate party politics while next term's freshmen run the gauntlet of brutal initiation rites, barely comforted by the knowledge that they'll wield the stick one day.
Short Cuts
Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver short stories, Short Cuts weaves between 8 or 9 overlapping storylines and 22 characters. it's a teeming, caustic and compassionate human comedy; a singularly astringent, often cynical view of America and Americana.
Three Colours: Blue
The first of Kieslowski's acclaimed Three Colours Trilogy, inspired by the French Revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity and the French flag, the Tricolour. Blue stars Juliette Binoche as a young woman grieving her husband and child.
Schindler's List
One of the most acclaimed films of the 90s, Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Thomas Keneally's Schindler's Ark is the story of a German industrialist whose conscience is stirred to save his Jewish workers from the camps.
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Three Colours: Red
Irène Jacob plays Valentine, a runway model living in Geneva, who crosses paths with a retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who's a bit of an eavesdropper. Initially repelled, she becomes intrigued by this man, as do we... Kieslowski's sublime adieu.
Four Weddings and a Funeral
Four Weddings begins with an onslaught of fucks. It's the first signal that this rom-com will break from tradition, despite the ritualized structural conceit described in the title. The witty screenplay is by Richard Curtis — it's still his best.
The Lion King
With its beautifully drawn East African setting, its humour, pathos, and engaging characters, as well as its stirring songs, The Lion King stands as the pinnacle of traditional Disney family entertainment.
Image: © Disney, 1994
To Die For
Buck Henry (The Graduate) wrote this acidic black comedy about a ruthless weather girl on the make (Nicole Kidman in her breakout role). A young Joaquin Phoenix is the dim teen she seduces on her way to achieving stardom.