Casinos are a fun and exciting place to socialize while trying your luck at games of chance. The flashy decor, pulsing music and throng of people all contribute to the overall energy of casinos. They also often offer food and drinks, as well as entertainment options like shows and floor shows. They are a great place for everyone from the oligarch to the weekend bus tripper.

With Casino, Scorsese created a vision of Sin City that was at once glamorous and cynical. While the movie depicts gangsters as heartless, ruthless, and unrepentant, it also portrays them as the last honest practitioners of an old-fashioned racket. De Niro and Pesci are both excellent, with the latter especially delivering a slew of cynical lines that make Ace seem less like a dashing gangster and more like a cynical, morally corrupt bureaucrat.

The movie’s setting is liminal, not just between Victorianism and Modernism but between organized crime and big business. The mafia operates in a rough blur of corruption, but it has to compete with the antiseptic operations of large corporations that are antiseptically displacing not just mob bosses but organized labor as well. The resulting tensions are not resolved. Similarly, the competing methods of understanding that drive Ace and Nicky do not coalesce into some sort of novel authority figure, but rather collide against each other.