A casino is a place where you can socialize with friends and meet new people. You can enjoy games like blackjack, where players try to beat the dealer, or roulette, in which players bet on a number with a spinning wheel. Most casinos also offer poker, in which players compete against each other and the house takes a small fee, known as rake, from every bet.

Unlike Goodfellas or Martin Scorsese’s other epic mob movies, Casino is not as concerned with a centralized criminal organization and more about illuminating the city of Las Vegas and the massive machine that churned it out. Using a Steadicam that evokes echoes of the Copacabana sequence in Goodfellas, the movie opens with a dazzling money counting room at the Tangiers Casino. Here, the crooked bookie Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) skims off cash, as long as the kickbacks go to his old-school mob bosses in Kansas City.

Although he is not a mobster, Ace has to deal with thugs like loose-cannon Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) and a drug-addicted trophy wife, Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone). The movie’s enthralling performances — especially Stone’s, which builds on her star-making turn in Basic Instinct and inverts it at the same time — make the film a must-see. It is a testament to the cast’s talents that they can take such a morally corrupt story and make it compelling. The characters are mired in violence, treachery, and avarice, but they get their comeuppance at the end.