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Top 5 Casino Movies
It is the film director who gets the plaudits when a film successfully depicts a particular theme or genre, and with online casino popularity seemingly increasing all the time, a lot of directors are choosing a casino as the place to set their films. This setting provides an unbeatable mix of risk, danger and retro glamour, which makes for some truly iconic movie moments. These are the top five casino movies.
Rain Man
This 1987 film with Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman introduced cinema audiences to autism – and it was the casino blackjack card counting scene that really stood out in this respect. It features a killer performance from Hoffman as the maths savant Raymond Babbitt.
Casino
If you want to see the danger behind the glamour of the Vegas casinos during their Mafia days, this 1995 Martin Scorsese movie is the place to go. Here Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro) shows how they deal with those they catch cheating.
Casino Royale
Most Bond films involve sequences in casinos, but they are rarely as important as the one in this 2006 Daniel Craig effort. Depicting the rebooted, tougher 007 in a Texas Hold’em poker duel with Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) with very high stakes, it ramps up the tension to the very last hand.
Cincinnati Kid
This is a movie all about gambling, but again it is the final hand of the epic battle between the Kid (Steve McQueen) and the Man (Edward G Robinson) that sticks in the mind It defines the film, and shows the other side of gambling.
Ocean’s 11
This 2001 caper with George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon is about their attempt to heist the casinos of Vegas, but before all that we get a great poker scene with Clooney and Pitt that shows us the risk-taking, super-cool natures of Danny Ocean and Rusty Ryan.
These are all great casino movies and hopefully The Gambler with Mark Wahlberg as a gambling obsessed literature professor, will provide another film to match them.