With violence, treachery and avarice as its central theme, Casino is not really a movie for good guys. Nevertheless, its cast, led by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, is stellar. Sharon Stone, who spikes the movie’s energy with her depiction of blonde hustler Ginger McKenna, proves she can do more than just glamorize grifting and seduction; she also delivers a heartfelt portrayal of human tragedy.

Casino is a film about Vegas, and it also reveals how its mob past influenced the city’s evolution into a gambling empire minting billions. Unlike many epic crime dramas, Scorsese doesn’t focus on the story of individual characters; instead, he lays bare an institution system of corruption, with tendrils reaching from casinos to politicians and the Teamsters union to the Chicago mob and the Midwest mafia based out of Kansas City.

Casino’s early sequences, with deliberate echoes of the Copacabana interlude in Goodfellas and the money counting room scene in Basic Instinct, are bravura set pieces. But director Robert Richardson’s sensibility is less exuberant than rueful, and carefully attuned to institutional systems of grift. Every casino game has a built-in advantage, or house edge, that ensures the institution’s gross profit over time. This is determined by mathematicians and computer programmers who study the variance of each game’s results. The resulting data tells the house how much of its games’ revenue to expect, and it helps the managers plan for expenses, such as payroll and utilities.