Martin Scorsese's Mob Trilogy: Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman
Martin Scorsese has made more than two dozen feature films. Three of them — Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Irishman (2019) — form a loose trilogy about the American Mafia that together constitute the most sustained and serious cinematic examination of organized crime in the history of the medium. Each film is complete on its own terms. Together they form something larger: a meditation on what America looked like in the 20th century when you stood outside the law and looked in.
Goodfellas (1990): The Romance and Its Costs
Goodfellas operates in two registers simultaneously. The first half of the film is genuinely seductive — the money, the status, the belonging, the excitement of the life as Henry Hill experienced it and as Ray Liotta narrates it with irresistible energy. The music cues, the tracking shots, the voiceover all cooperate to make the life seem attractive, because that's what it was. The second half is the accounting: what the life actually cost, and what Henry became in the process of living it.
The film's formal achievement is making both registers feel true simultaneously. The life was exciting and it was corrosive. The money was real and so was the violence. Scorsese doesn't choose between these truths; he holds them in tension throughout. The result is a film that has never stopped generating conversation because it refuses to provide comfortable moral resolution.
Casino (1995): The System Exposed
Casino is Goodfellas turned inside out. Where Goodfellas is about the romance of the life and its personal cost, Casino is about the institutional relationship between organized crime and legitimate power. The Vegas mob — the Chicago Outfit's operation through Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal — is depicted as a functioning business, and the film's real subject is how that business was dismantled by corporations and politicians who replaced it with something structurally identical but legally sanitized.
De Niro's Sam Rothstein is a more controlled character than Henry Hill — a professional rather than a thrill-seeker — and his eventual destruction has the quality of institutional sacrifice rather than personal failure. The film is angrier than Goodfellas and more explicitly political. It is less pleasurable and possibly more honest.
The Irishman (2019): The Final Accounting
The Irishman is what happens when Scorsese returns to the mob film at 76 years old with a cast in their 70s and a story about the end of everything. De Niro's Frank Sheeran, Pacino's Jimmy Hoffa, and Pesci's Russell Bufalino don't have the energy of youth — the film knows this and uses it. The violence, when it comes, is quieter and more devastating than anything in Goodfellas. The final act — Sheeran in a nursing home, accounting for his life to a priest who cannot absolve him of what he's done — is Scorsese making his statement about what a life spent in service to violence actually amounts to.
The film received mixed initial reactions for its length (three and a half hours) and pacing. It has grown in estimation since its Netflix release, with many critics now considering it Scorsese's most mature work. The de-aging technology used on the principal actors varies in effectiveness, but the performances beneath it are among the finest of the three films.
The Trilogy as a Whole
Goodfellas covers the 1950s through 1980 — the mob's peak decades. Casino covers the 1970s and 1980s — the Vegas years and the corporate takeover. The Irishman covers the 1950s through the 1970s from the perspective of someone looking back across his entire life. Together they cover the full arc of American organized crime's 20th-century moment, from the street-level romance to the institutional machinery to the final reckoning.
The throughline is De Niro — present in all three, playing different men but the same essential type: the man who chose the life, executed it competently, and paid the price the life demands. In Goodfellas he plays the most cold-eyed version (Jimmy Conway). In Casino he plays the most professional version (Sam Rothstein). In The Irishman he plays the version that has to look back at what it all meant (Frank Sheeran). The trilogy is, in this reading, a single character study conducted over three decades.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Goodfellas or Casino?
Goodfellas is more pleasurable and more technically exhilarating; Casino is more ambitious and more politically explicit. Goodfellas is the more rewatchable film; Casino rewards a single careful viewing more than repeated viewings. Both are essential.
Is The Irishman as good as Goodfellas?
The Irishman operates in a completely different register than Goodfellas — slower, more elegiac, more focused on regret than on the pleasures that precede it. Whether it is "as good" depends on what you want from a mob film. It is the more formally ambitious film; Goodfellas is the more viscerally satisfying one.