But what really rankled was the way Casino seemed to me like a gaudier, more Hollywood-ized version of Goodfellas - as if Scorsese and co-writer Nicholas Pileggi had taken some of the elements of their successful earlier film and re-shuffled them with the added commercial elements of a Las Vegas setting, a bigger budget and the star power of Sharon Stone (then one of Hollywood’s hottest commodities). Comparisons were always going to be unavoidable. They both, after all, featured Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci as mobsters, there were shocking bursts of violence, epic tracking shots, copious amounts of voice-over narration, healthy doses of black humor, eclectic soundtracks on which the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter” prominently featured, and so on. I left the theater feeling disappointed - mainly because it failed to live up to Goodfellas, the prior Scorsese movie that it seemed to most closely resemble.

I first saw it during its original theatrical run in 1995 when I was 20-years-old. Out of all the films I used to feel ambivalent about but which I have since positively reappraised due to my wife’s having watched them over and over in front of me, none has risen more dramatically in my estimation than Martin Scorsese’s Casino.

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