Top Ten Gangster Movies

Casino is often believed to be inferior to Goodfellas, due to a large resemblance in tone, pacing, and the storyline, but I consider it to be what The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly is to Dollar Trilogy: something of a remake that improves on the original movie. The Dollar Trilogy is a single movie largely upgraded in story, visuals and characters every time around; Casino is Godfellas with a lot more style, complexity and realism.

I found myself caring for the movie's characters much more than for those in the other Scorsese's gangster biography flick - Ace isn't a hypocritical brat that Henry Hill was, but a criminal who's trying to stop, and who's got real human feelings, and Ginger is someone who feels like a cynical hustler, but, as the movie progresses, we are shown all of her weaknesses and insecurities, while Karen Hill was a woman craving for money and success, who just felt sorry it all had to end. Even Joe Pesci isn't the one-dimensional crazy guy that his analogous character in Goodfellas was.

Casino is way more entertaining and it has much more emotion to it, but it fails to get the praising that its predecessor does, simply because of the prejudice that directors are falling short of ideas when their movies resemble each other.

As for other great gangster flicks, many of them have already been mentioned, but I also like some British stuff a lot. The first one is Layer Cake. It does resemble Guy Richie's flicks a bit(and I don't like those, because I find them somewhat boring), but this one's a fun, intelligent, and well-acted gangster movie. The Long Good Friday would be a great movie even if its only scene was the final one, and Sexy Beast does have a Sir-Ben-acting-against-type-overload, but it's surprisingly well made, with some great characters and an interesting storyline, which is basically, for its most part, the first act of a heist movie.