Casino

Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film watches Ace Rothstein run the Tangiers casino in Las Vegas while his enforcer friend Nicky works the town by other means. The real house behind the Tangiers was the Stardust, renamed for legal reasons. Much of the opening is instruction rather than incident: how the skim leaves the count room, what the cameras above the floor see, who gets paid to look away. Across 179 minutes that lesson keeps returning, and two narrators hand the story back and forth, so scenes get explained more often than they are left to build. Interiors were shot inside the Riviera between one and four in the morning so real gamblers could keep playing; the shuttered Landmark Hotel gave the entrance seen from outside. Ace’s licence hearing has a real Nevada Gaming Control Board session behind it. Saul and Elaine Bass designed the opening titles, the last such sequence the pair made. The violence drew an NC-17 on first submission and was trimmed to reach an R. Sharon Stone won the drama actress Golden Globe; the film’s only Oscar nomination was hers, in lead actress. A good fit if you want the money routes and surveillance rules laid out at length, not implied. Not for anyone who would rather watch events unfold than hear two narrators account for them.