Casino is a fascinating, layered movie with many captivating themes. It is much more than a Mafia story, unlike Goodfellas and Mobster or Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, which are great Sin City movies but only skim the surface. Casino gets beneath the glitz and neon, to reveal Las Vegas’ past ties with organized crime. It also shows how the city is a machine that swallows and then spits out people like Ace, Nicky, and Ginger.

The film is anchored by a remarkable performance from Robert De Niro as Sam “Ace” Rothstein, who runs one of the top casinos in Vegas. He is tough but basically honest for a mobster. His partner, Joe Pesci’s Nicky, is a nut-job who lets anger govern his decisions. Both men have their downfalls.

Scorsese tells this story with the usual energy and pacing, but Casino is also filled with many little touches that feel just right. From a moment when Ace orders the casino cooks to put exactly the same amount of blueberries in every muffin, to an airborne feds’ plane running out of gas while spying on the gangsters on golf, to the fact that the mobster-owned Tangiers has no clocks or windows to hide its sleazy operations, these details show how much Scorsese immersed himself in the world he depicted. The violence is shocking and authentic, from a torture-by-vice scene with a popped eyeball to the eventual murder of Nicky (buried alive in a cornfield). Yet, for all its bravura set pieces and its own brand of filmmaking excitement, Scorsese’s sensibility here is less exuberant than rueful, and carefully attuned to institutional systems of grift.