It's GoodFellas goes to Las Vegas as director Martin Scorsese returns to the mean streets of urban America, with which he is so familiar, for Casino, a hugely underrated and shocking tale of power, money and depravity, set in a city where you can bet on everything and all dreams are sold for cash. Scorsese's disturbing film is basically about the Mafia, adrift in the 1970s without its warped code of "moral" and "family" values to keep it in check. Robert De Niro plays Sam "Ace" Rothstein, a master bookie turned big-shot casino manager whose head for business deserts him when he marries ex-hooker Ginger McKenna (Sharon Stone). But it's when Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci), Ace's boyhood acquaintance, arrives in town with an ambitious agenda of his own that things take a further downward spiral. Written by Nicholas Pileggi, an Oscar nominee for GoodFellas, Casino goes for absorbing realism, intriguing subplots and expertly drawn characters - Stone is an absolute revelation in her demanding role - who are even less endearing than their counterparts in GoodFellas, making for a more even portrayal of organised crime. Some of the scenes are squirmingly unpleasant in Scorsese's trademark way: a victim's head being squeezed in a vice is one of the more extreme examples of the graphic brutality that's on display in this unflagging and compelling study of how mobsters drowned in the sleaze of their own making.

In Las Vegas, two best friends--a casino executive and a Mafia enforcer--compete for a gambling empire and a fast-living, fast-loving socialite.