good essay on Scorsese's underrated Color Of Money

Equally arresting is the sudden bark “Come on, on the snap, Vincent!” This seems to come from nowhere—Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio was briefly visible a moment earlier, sitting behind Turturro as he calls for Cruise to join the game, but she doesn’t really register unless you’re looking for her. So now there’s some woman involved. Following some dorky samurai theatrics (foreshadowing Oprah’s couch, one could argue), Cruise starts making out with her, so we may file her under Girlfriend. But she seems way more intense about the unfolding action than one would expect of somebody that easily reducible, and the mere fact that her presence in the room has been carefully obscured tells us that she’s important. Newman senses it, too. After goggling at Cruise’s offer to “play play”—the very notion of pool divorced from financial gain seems heretical to everyone but this flaky virtuoso; Turturro’s silent exit is priceless—he takes a seat on the table behind Mastrantonio, prompting her (in a nice bit of business I don’t think I’d ever noticed before) to move a leather jacket away from where he could swipe it...