Many of the things that draw people to casinos are about how they make them feel: the gleaming lights and clinking slots, the champagne glasses clinking, the throngs of happy people chatting, laughing, or dancing. These feelings are all things that marketers can build on and leverage to attract new customers.

As a business, casinos are highly competitive and face multiple threats including non-gambling resorts, online gambling, private gambling, and an illegal casino industry much larger than the legal one. To stay profitable, casinos must focus on their core values and target their audience appropriately.

Like Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls and Goodfellas, Casino is not just set in Sin City but about it; a civic portrait with a grimy underbelly, a city of money-laundering and crooked officials. Casino’s bravura set pieces and the re-recruited pairing of Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci are powerful but it is Sharon Stone’s performance as Ginger that really elevates the film.

Casino is more than just a crime drama; it’s also a love story and a tale of redemption. In a world of corruption, treachery and violence, Casino creates characters that are unlikeable but whose downfall we cannot help but empathize with. Its use of sound design, particularly a torture-by-vice sequence that includes a popped eyeball and a baseball bat beating, is particularly chilling. Like many other great films, it requires the viewer to be in a particular mood and well prepared to be moved.