This text originally ran in 2020 and is being republished ahead of the discharge of Paul Schrader’s www.filmink.com.au/the-best-movies-about-gaming/ The Card Counter.

Movies about gambling have an inherent drama because, by definition, they’re about danger. It’s not fun to observe somebody be prudent and cautious, however to see somebody continuously putting his well-being on the line in determined, irrational hope for that One Big Score … nicely, gamblers in gambling movies are in some ways just like that veteran cop who takes One Last Case before retirement. They normally don’t end up with a calm residence life upstate, counting their winnings.

So, with the discharge of Paul Schrader’s The Card Counter, we determined to take a look again at some of the best movies about gambling. A notice on methodology: We tried to verify we emphasized the playing over the movie. Few would argue that Rounders is best than Casino, but Casino is less concerning the playing and more about the world in which that gambling takes place; Rounders is unquestionably about the gambling. We veered more toward motion pictures about the playing. Luckily, a whole lot of them occur to be nice movies all on their very own.

26. Vegas Vacation (1997)

All proper, so we all know this isn’t a very good movie: It’s probably the worst Vacation film, with the attainable exception of that terrible reboot with Ed Helms. But you’ll have to only indulge us on this one, because it has maybe the only funniest, dumbest on line casino joke of all time. Basically, Clark Griswold develops an addiction to playing and is tormented by a card-supplier named Marty performed - awesomely - by Wallace Shawn. Clark is so bad at gambling that, at one point at a "discount" on line casino, he forks over $20 to play a recreation referred to as "Pick a Number Between 1 and 10?" He guesses "4." The vendor says "nope, 7," and … just takes his cash. Clark storms away, grumbling to himself. The idea that such a sport would exist mainly sums up Las Vegas, and gambling typically. It’s maybe essentially the most trustworthy attainable card game.

25. Lucky You (2007)

Made within the heat of the now-mercifully-cooled World Series of Poker craze, the late Curtis Hanson put a right away halt to his terrific L.A. Confidential/Wonder Boys/eight Mile/In Her Shoes run with this mostly hackneyed story of a superstar poker participant (Eric Bana) with an advanced relationship along with his even bigger superstar poker-participant father (Robert Duvall). We've got seen that story one million instances in one million better sports activities motion pictures - this even has a big Game at the top - but both Bana and Duvall discover some truth of their characters regardless. This movie was a disaster on the box workplace, and Hanson’s scorching streak was over.

24. 21 (2008)

Based on the true (if embellished by author Ben Mezrich) story of the MIT Blackjack Team that beat the home for practically a decade, 21 turns an interesting math and enterprise story into a kind of dumb heist film featuring quite a lot of young, handsome actors (Jim Sturgess, Kate Bosworth, Aaron Yoo, Jacob Pitts, and even Josh Gad) trying to tug one over on Kevin Spacey. Spacey is particularly checked-out here, and the film was criticized for "whitewashing" in its casting, turning the mostly Asian-American actual-life players into generic white folks. But for a brief second, earlier than Spacey is being kidnapped and crushed in a hotel room, it’s an fascinating look on the science behind smart gambling. But just for a moment.

23. Let It Ride (1989)

An odd little comedy a few perpetual loser gambling addict (Richard Dreyfuss) who, for someday, hits on every single wager at the horse races. This simply evokes him to push more durable and keep it going, and while this would possibly grow to be a disaster in a movie like, say, Uncut Gems, right here, it’s just a wacky ’80s comedy. Let It Ride still will get quite a lot of comedic mileage out of Dreyfuss’s mania and goes a long way on some very fun supporting performances from Teri Garr, Jennifer Tilly, and David Johansen. But let’s simply say they don’t present this one at Gamblers Anonymous conferences.

22. Maverick (1994)

There was a time that Mel Gibson was thought of such a light and lively leading man that an enormous-price range studio film could coast on his charm as a card shark and con man. Based on the favored ’50s television collection (and co-starring that show’s lead, James Garner), Maverick is a little bit of a bloated contraption, too long and too overstuffed with would-be-epic-and-most likely-pointless Western scope by Richard Donner. However the film nonetheless has its pleasures, not least of which is Gibson’s pal Jodie Foster, who has a blast enjoying the sort of damsel-in-distress feminine sidekick position she’d otherwise spent most of her career avoiding. It’s a gasoline to watch her so giddy.

21. The Cooler (2003)

This likable indie’s greatest high quality is its premise: Meet Bernie (William H. Macy), an expert loser whose job it's to spoil any excessive-roller’s hot streak just by playing at the same craps desk. The Cooler begins off as a unhappy, humorous character examine of a recovering playing addict who’s still in large debt to Alec Baldwin’s tough-guy casino boss - he’s working off what he owes by being the guy’s go-to "cooler" - but the love of a good girl (Maria Bello’s weary cocktail waitress) may just change his luck. Realism takes a backseat to romance and crowd-pleasing sentiment in Wayne Kramer’s directorial debut, and the followthrough isn’t as entertaining as the setup. But Macy was born to play this type of hangdog failure who hasn’t stopped betting on himself.

20. Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

Often, film characters who gamble are introduced as sobering cautionary tales. Nobody instructed Steven Soderbergh, who turned his remake of the creaky Rat Pack caper right into a jazzy, fleet-footed blast. From the early scene the place George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s ultra-cool characters square off at the card table, it’s clear that this Ocean’s Eleven will exude the sleek, cocky spirit of fashionable Vegas, which is all upscale adult pleasures and little or no precise degenerate behavior. Soderbergh’s ensemble is impeccably dressed and never fussed, sporting the swagger that actual gamblers want they had. The filmmaker isn’t interested within the intricacies of playing, and he also thinks the games’ metaphors are equally foolish - as demonstrated by one of the film’s greatest moments:

19. Molly’s Game (2017)

In case you chafe at Aaron Sorkin’s showy, know-it-all perspective in his screenplays, then be warned: His directorial debut is the Oscar-winner at his Sorkin-iest. Molly’s Game is predicated on the memoir of Molly Bloom, a former champion skier who shifts careers after a terrible accident, turning her consideration to the world of underground poker. Jessica Chastain is coiled-cobra cocky as Molly, strolling us by this illegal but highly addictive and profitable ecosystem as she turns into the queen of organizing high-stakes video games. This thriller is much too pleased with its own cleverness - a chronic Sorkin shortcoming - but you are feeling Molly’s rush, and also you meet some really heartbreaking characters, including Bill Camp’s hopeless gambler. It’s horrifying to watch him drown in gradual motion.

18. Casino (1995)

"In Vegas, everybody’s gotta watch everybody else." In 1973, Robert De Niro performed the harmful, unpredictable hothead reverse Harvey Keitel’s sensible mobster in Mean Streets - a pair decades later, it was De Niro because the man with the burden of obligations bearing down on him. In Casino, he’s Ace, a gangster operating a mobbed-up on line casino who’s attempting to do things "the proper means," only to be undercut by his hotheaded pal (Joe Pesci) and an bold girl (Sharon Stone) he shouldn’t trust. Want to grasp the inside workings of Vegas gambling? Martin Scorsese’s intricate drama is for you, chronicling Sin City’s evolution from seedy to sanitized over the span of a number of years. As he did previously with GoodFellas, Scorsese understands how American enterprise works in the criminal underworld - and in addition how people get trampled on along the best way.

17. The Hustler (1961)

When you consider the parameters of our gambling film rankings, we should say, The Hustler isn’t as good a gambling movie as its sequel, The Color of money, (which you'll find later on this checklist) … but it surely probably is a better film overall. The 1961 authentic is much less concerned with a swaggering Tom Cruise-Paul Newman film-star face-off and extra targeted on loyalty and integrity and ambition. Newman’s Fast Eddie Felson is like a extra fascinating model of Cruise’s character, and his battle to take down Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats follows a extra human, soulful narrative than a typical sports-film arc. It’s higher the much less it is concerning the pool hustling … which is great, however keeps it decrease on this listing.

16. Bugsy (1991)

An origin story of Las Vegas, Bugsy is principally a examine of Bugsy Siegel, a gangster who travels to the desert, satisfied he’s seen the mob’s future. Lavish, classy, and good, director Barry Levinson’s Oscar-profitable drama follows Siegel in his seemingly quixotic dream of making a mecca of gambling and casinos, and Warren Beatty keenly plays him as a man of passions but perhaps not enough purpose. Bugsy is less about playing - although Siegel absolutely takes some large possibilities - than it's about Sin City’s messy start, which proves fascinating, even if the movie’s glitzy, prestige-image trappings are a bit limiting.

15. Atlantic City (1980)

Today, the legalization of gambling has become a Hail Mary last-ditch effort for a lot of financially eroding urban areas like Detroit, St. Louis, and others - however Atlantic City did this first. Louis Malle’s heartbreaking however nonetheless charming, even regal Atlantic City captures both the blight of Atlantic City - which led to the legalization of playing there in the first place - and the hope among the poor dreamers still hanging round its edges. With a screenplay written by John Guare, the movie features an honest, previous-faculty film-star efficiency from Burt Lancaster and a riveting turn from a young Susan Sarandon as a on line casino waitress with dreams of being a seller but an ex-husband she can’t shake. The film feels each dated and timeless, capturing a selected moment that has the ability of folklore.

14. Eight Men Out (1988)

John Sayles’s historical drama in regards to the Black Sox scandal of 1919, when members of the Chicago White Sox (including legend Shoeless Joe Jackson) threw the World Series to gamblers, is particularly instructive today, when skilled sports have embraced gambling revenues wholeheartedly, ignoring the lessons of the previous. The story of Eight Men Out is much less about corruption from the players than it's a labor-management conflict: The players fix the series not out of greed but out of desperation when their owner refuses to reward them for an unbelievable season. Gambling’s corrosive affect on sports activities has largely been forgotten within the current years, however Eight Men Out reminds us of its perils.

13. The Color of cash (1986)

Paul Newman gained his only Oscar for The Color of money, revisiting the character of Fast Eddie Felson, whom he performed in 1961’s The Hustler. The sequel is a movie about an aging pool shark at a crossroads. "He needed to stop gambling," Scorsese said in Conversations With Scorsese. "He had turn into a unique type of hustler in a method, selling liquor. But he couldn’t resist the joy of the sport. I imply, not just pool, but livening up the game of life, which is the real gamble." That quote undersells the film’s cautionary tone - how it portrays its characters, together with Tom Cruise’s upstart pool participant Vincent, as people who have thrown away their lives on a recreation that doesn’t love them again. This isn’t certainly one of Scorsese’s best movies - and as we stated earlier, The Hustler is the higher overall film - but it’s stable and despairing. Like with Scorsese’s mobsters, these are people who are magnetic however not ones you’d wish to spend time with in real life.

12. The Sting (1973)

Who says playing can’t be really fun? This Best Picture winner exudes pure pleasure … nicely, until you run afoul of Shaw (Paul Newman) and Kelly (Robert Redford), that's. These two con males resolve to take down a no-good mobster (Robert Shaw), and their elaborate grift involves card video games and horse racing. Understanding the machinations of Shaw and Kelly’s plan doesn’t matter - it’s only a delight to observe the characters (and director George Roy Hill) flip The Sting into one big, electric narrative sport. These are some winners who're simple to root for.

11. Owning Mahowny (2003)

When you strip away all of the supposed glamour and glitz of playing and concentrate on the crippling, oppressive addiction, you get Owning Mahowny, the true story of a Canadian financial institution supervisor (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who stole money from his financial institution and used it to make a sequence of more and more harmful bets in Atlantic City. Hoffman, as you may count on, is sensible within the position, elusive and pathetic in equal measure, a man who is helpless to regulate himself however does his finest to dangle on as long as he can regardless. The movie is so tuned in to Hoffman’s frequency that it’s almost too distant to the viewer: His Mahowny is so locked in his own head that there’s no method for us to get in. But this might be as close to the terror of what it’s truly like to have a gambling addiction as a movie can in all probability get.

10. Rounders (1998)

We say this every time we write about Rounders, however it stays true: "It’s mainly Citizen Kane for playing addicts and … completely wonderful for everyone else." That places it larger on this record than it can be on nearly every other, but it surely does do a superb job of capturing the swaggering, dopey masculinity of being an expert poker participant. (Or no less than of being one within the late ’90s.) We’re glad Matt Damon finally grew out of those roles, but a supporting forged like this (John Malkovich! John Turturro! Martin Landau! Famke Janssen! Even Bill Camp!) can’t assist but populate this with individuals who make a mostly artificial world feel real and lived-in. Still: See The Cincinnati Kid, folks. (That’ll be coming up on this listing shortly.)

9. The Card Counter (2021)

Paul Schrader’s sleek, moody, anguished drama about knowledgeable card player (a unbelievable Oscar Isaac) who travels from casino to casino as a solution to have some quiet management over his life and hide from the guilt in his previous is more fun, however not much less intense, than Schrader often has: He clearly loves this explicit milieu and delights in detailing its intricacies and nuances. The gambling scenes sometimes sit uneasily alongside Schrader’s traditional tone of guilt and pain, but in addition they enliven and energize each him and the movie. And for all of the totally different examples of Cool Movie Gamblers on this list, Isaac’s could be very close to the highest: We're not gamblers, but when we were, he does it the best way we prefer to pretend we would: smart, cautious … and at all times in control.

8. Mississippi Grind (2015)

Before they jumped aboard the Marvel bandwagon, Half Nelson filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck crafted this lovingly retro two-hander about a few inveterate gamblers driving down south to a new Orleans poker game with doubtlessly big payoffs. This might be Ryan Reynolds’s finest performance: He’s terrific as the backslapping Curtis who befriends the troubled Gerry (Ben Mendelsohn). Addiction, depression, and remorse are the hallmarks of Mississippi Grind, which doesn’t attempt to cover its debts to 1970s Hollywood - particularly, a sure Robert Altman movie that may seem later in these rankings. But that cinematic referencing does nothing to blunt the material’s determined, melancholy pull. Mississippi Grind virtually reeks of stale cigarettes and half-drunk cans of beer: It’s a portrait of nonstop playing as one unhappy grind.

7. Croupier (1998)

Clive Owen has been such a familiar, considerably disappointing, presence in movies for the last two a long time that it’s now hard to remember what a lightning bolt his arrival was. So go back and rewatch Croupier, the place all that promise was laid out pretty magnificently. He’s Jack, an aspiring novelist determined for money - soon, he’s a croupier attending to know the world of casino playing. Pitched like a hard-boiler noir - Jack has the blasé seen-it-all vibe of a non-public dick - Croupier explores the sweaty anxiety and crippling sadness of those who've thrown their lives (and cash) away at the tables. If the plot complications aren’t always satisfying, the film’s vivid recreation of dingy casino life is utterly intoxicating. It’s a shame that Owen has not often discovered a film since that’s so magnetic.

6. The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

Considered a bit of a knockoff of The Hustler at the time, this film, which concentrates on poker slightly than pool hustling, holds up just in addition to that movie, and perhaps even higher, if simply because folks do much more poker-taking part in than pool-hustling anymore. It additionally has a traditional Steve McQueen efficiency as "the Kid," a cocky player who learns he’s perhaps not as great as he thinks he's. The film feels present and taut and relevant. Put it this way: All the bros you understand who assume Rounders is the perfect film ever clearly haven’t seen this.

5. Tricheurs (1984)

The perfect gambling film you’ve by no means heard of. Right before Barbet Schroeder gave us Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, and Single White Female, he made this mad, irresistible little thriller about a charming man (played by French rock star Jacques Dutronc) with such a desperate addiction to playing that he in the end doesn’t actually care if he wins or loses. That turns into an even greater problem when he meets up with a man who enlists him in a sophisticated dishonest scheme that simply raises the stakes to an unmanageable level. Tricheurs isn’t judgmental of these gamblers and cheaters: It simply follows them alongside to their inevitable doom. Not that the journey isn’t a wicked, darkish blast regardless.

4. Hard Eight (1996)

Paul Thomas Anderson’s first movie, an enlargement of a short film he made referred to as Coffee & Cigarettes (and starring a character known as Sydney that Philip Baker Hall previously performed in Midnight Run), was a significant ache for the neophyte filmmaker, a film he nearly lost the rights to (and whose title he famously hates). And while it can’t stand up to PTA’s masterworks, it’s a exceptional debut, a examine of a sad, lonely man who has discovered to survive in the underworld of Las Vegas by being quiet and unassuming till he meets people who may truly need his help. It’s much less showy than you’d anticipate from Anderson’s first film - he was saving his actually bravura stuff for Boogie Nights - however it’s deeply moving: The film seems to understand Las Vegas, and the males you never notice when you’re there, on an virtually transcendent level. And Philip Seymour Hoffman’s one scene is immortal:

3. Uncut Gems (2019)

Every time we see the "This is how I win" meme on social media, we can’t assist however assume … you understand, that second in Uncut Gems is basically heartbreaking. For all the effectively-deserved dialogue about the fact that Josh and Benny Safdie’s thriller is extremely intense, what will get disregarded is precisely why it’s so nerve-wracking. And that’s as a result of Howard, wonderfully played by Adam Sandler, is a hopeless playing addict who can not cease till he destroys himself completely. The brilliance of Uncut Gems is in Howard’s ability to get us sucked into his sickness, making us think, even for a moment, that, yes, he is likely to be able to tug off this crazed caper he’s concocted - yes, perhaps that is how he wins. Never as soon as moralizing about their doomed protagonist, the Safdies inject his mania directly into our veins, riding along on his crazed rush. Yet here’s the craziest part: After seeing the film’s tragic finale, you may want to get proper back on the ride immediately. Addiction is sort of like that.

2. The Gambler (1974)

James Toback, who has since been hit with allegations of all sorts of problematic behavior, primarily based his screenplay on his own playing addiction, but what’s nice in regards to the Gambler - the 1974 James Caan model, clearly, not the 2014 Mark Wahlberg one - is that the title character is much less obsessed with gambling than he is with danger, even self-destruction. His Axel makes bets merely to dig himself deeper and deeper into trouble, even arguing that, for him, the fun of betting is dropping. That’s a perilous scenario for a gambler, to say the least, but Caan sells us on Axel’s desperate chase for the following rush. Axel isn’t betting on basketball: He’s taking part in Russian roulette.

1. California Split (1974)

The story goes that Robert Altman despatched Elliot Gould the screenplay to California Split, hoping he’d play Charlie, a gambler who befriends fellow gambler Bill (George Segal). "I’ve at all times needed to play this man," Gould told the director, to which Altman replied, "You are this guy." Hopefully not - Charlie’s addiction is pretty extreme - however the actor exuded his laid-again charm to wonderful effect whereas working with Segal, who wasn’t that enthusiastic about playing. And yet the two men’s rakish charm, in one of many high watermarks of ’70s hangout cinema, makes this not simply an important buddy movie but an attractive exploration of boys-will-be-boys friendship. And, in fact, there’s a whole lot of gambling, which Altman movies with casual mastery, letting us eavesdrop on the bizarre characters and harmful oddballs who populate that world. California Split remains perhaps the director’s most underrated traditional - and its intestine-punch ending is so muted, yet so excellent.

Grierson & Leitch write concerning the movies frequently and host a podcast on movie. Follow them on Twitter or go to their site.