Actor

Joe Pesci

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Casino

Martin Scorsese · 1995

Martin Scorsese's 1995 film, adapted with Nicholas Pileggi from Pileggi's nonfiction book, follows Sam 'Ace' Rothstein, sent by the Chicago Outfit to run the fictional Tangiers casino, as his marriage to hustler Ginger McKenna and his friendship with volatile enforcer Nicky Santoro both collapse around him. Based closely on the real skimming operation run through Las Vegas's Stardust casino in the 1970s, and shot largely inside the actual Riviera casino rather than on built sets, the 178-minute film grossed $116 million against a $50 million budget and earned Sharon Stone an Academy Award nomination.

13:00

Goodfellas

Martin Scorsese · 1990

Martin Scorsese's 1990 account of Henry Hill's rise and fall inside the Lucchese crime family, adapted from Nicholas Pileggi's book Wiseguy. Told through overlapping narration and a compressed, accelerating style, it follows money, loyalty and violence as the daily business of a life Hill first found glamorous and eventually could not escape.

13:00

Raging Bull

Martin Scorsese · 1980

Martin Scorsese's 1980 film adapts former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta's own memoir into a study of a man whose jealousy and temper wreck his marriage and his relationship with his brother and manager Joey at the same rate his boxing career rises and falls. Shot in black and white, partly because research showed period boxing gloves came in too narrow a range of colours to justify colour film, and built around a physical transformation in which Robert De Niro gained roughly 60 pounds to play LaMotta's later years, the film returned only a modest $23.4 million against its $18 million budget on release but later won Oscars for De Niro's performance and Thelma Schoonmaker's editing.