Leaving a restaurant in Las Vegas in 1983, professional Jewish gambler Sam ‘Ace’ Rothstein’s car exploded. It was the final act in the Mob’s descent from Wizards of this particular Oz. (The Emerald City of Vegas attracts us moth-like as a pool of light in the tar-dark desert of the start.) By the final reel of this enormous picture, Bugsy Seagal’s dream is razed to the ground, only for an horrific slot-machine Disneyland to rise from its ashes. Artifice has subsumed what the voiceover tells us was ‘a morality car wash.’

Ace (Robert De Niro) was brought in to run the Tangiers, working alongside his boyhood pal, the diminutive, combustible Nicky (a compelling, mercurial Joe Pesci). Ace watches the money, Nicky watches the man’s back in all but his marriage to glamorous hustler Ginger (Sharon Stone), the one place he needed it the most. ‘When you love someone,’ he says, ‘you’ve got to trust them.’ Ace’s conviction comes home to roost in both of the mainstay relationships of his life. ‘In that kind of world the slightest infraction has to be dealt with immediately,’ says the director.

Voices will inevitably chorus been-there-done-that about another Scorsese chock-full of brutal, lippy gangsters, and especially one top-lining both of his goodfellas. Scorsese should mind; no one ever complains at endless Shakespeare or Jane Austin adaptations. Besides, this is a substantially different picture - it’s as much about the city as the people who play it for a gigantic cash register, about the way things were done, as the fools who ‘fucked it up’.

If we’re picking holes then look to the first act, larded as it is with wall-to-wall voiceover. It’s necessary, to establish the Mob heritage, the skimming scams, the faintly menacing ambience of this extraordinary city, but so far and no further. As the first hour of three clocks up, it approaches critical mass, threatening to implode the picture before it’s even started. When, suddenly, these sublimely placed manikins are given a voice, things change.

The second act is the big slide, the helter skelter into hell so brilliantly anticipated in the gorgeous neon-soaked Saul Bass titles. Ace begged Ginger to marry him despite her (legitimate) scepticism; sometimes the mother knows best. She can’t or won’t give up the juice, the drugs, her leechy ex-pimp Lester (played with sleazy magnificence by James Woods). Critically, she will never love their daughter, who she leaves tied to the bed for a night on the town. The only difference is the money - Ace’s money - that fuels her every waking moment, her dream that she can walk with contents of their safety deposit box. She’s an accident waiting to happen.

For a woman whose reputation is built on forgetting her knickers, this Sharon Stone is a real actress. Raised eyebrows at her casting are dispelled by her compelling playing. Ginger is a self-serving slut, slave to her own amusement who, given her chance, pisses it away in a muddle-headed haze. Stone’s is a towering performance that came up rightful Oscar trumps (the movie’s only nomination). She has a lot to live up to now.

To say Ginger dies in the final act is to give nothing away. Choreographed again and again to Devo geek-rock (with delicious irony, the Stones’ 'Satisfaction') most people here - like in Goodfellas - are either whacked or behind bars by the time the credits roll. The last twenty or so minutes are a catalogue of violence, from sleek pistol execution to bloody baseball bats; even then victims get to be buried alive. Casino is only occasionally a violent film, and nothing at the climax is quite as seat-squirming as the earlier ballpoint to the throat nor the celebrated eyeball-popping head-in-a-vice, but Scorsese takes no prisoners. Las Vegas is in meltdown.

De Niro, inevitably, survives and defiantly leads the entire picture. Scarcely off screen for three hours, he’s even better here than he was in Michael Mann’s recent Heat. His astonishingly garish pimp-scarlet, salmon-pink and Halloween-orange wardrobe doesn’t so much catch the eye as tie it to a chair and beat it with a club, but never at the expense of De Niro’s subtleties as a performer. Ace’s eyes are the window of his soul and no actor speaks so much with his gaze as this one. His quiet demeanour (Ace is big on other people spilling the blood) is mesmerising. For this we call him the actor of a generation and his own no-show in the Academy nominations defies logic.

And what of Scorsese himself, you ask? The diminutive director seems at home here, amongst the swearing (plenty of that), the guns and the duplicitous respect. A fish out of water on the technically brilliant but utterly sterile Age of Innocence, he knows this territory like a native. Nothing is trusted to luck in this veritable arsenal of cinematic language - freeze-frame, wipes, slo-mo, over-heads, selective lighting, close-up, even subtitles. Takes are often long, camera soaring this way and that, swooping, diving, observing. It’s virtuoso stuff, never used for effect, always driving a visual the narrative inexorably forward. If there is affect in any of this then, like Vegas itself, it’s affect for effect.

No one understands the vocabulary of cinema better than Scorsese, just as no one realises its punctuation quite so well as editor Thelma Schoonmaker. Casino is yet another master class in the art of the cutting table, her work as classical as it is audacious. The comparisons will persist between the old master and young pretender Tarantino, but nowhere in the exorbitantly over-praised Pulp Fiction will you find a tenth of the energy and grace lavished over every frame here. These shots are pregnant with detail and ambition.