The Top 10 Gambling Movies of All Time, and the Famous Ones That Didn’t Make It

Ask anyone who spends their working week around casinos which gambling movie is the best and you will not get a quick answer. Poker players defend Rounders past the point of reason, half the room refuses to accept that Ocean’s Eleven counts, and someone always brings up The Sting and starts a separate argument about whether a con is a bet. So, with the evenings getting longer and more of us on the sofa than at the tables, we drew up our own list.

A film had to clear three bars to get in. Gambling has to be the reason the story exists, not a scene dropped in for atmosphere. The games have to look right to someone who has sat at the table. And the film has to be straight about what the action does to the person placing the bet, win or lose. The result is our top 10 gambling movies, counted down from ten to one, with IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes scores under each title so the places where critics and audiences disagree with us are in plain sight. The famous titles that missed the cut are at the end, with reasons.

10. Mississippi Grind (2015)

IMDb 6.4/10 | RT critics 91% | RT audience 56%

Critics gave Mississippi Grind one of the highest scores on this list and audiences one of the lowest, a 35-point gap that comes from the film’s refusal to hand its gambler the redemption he keeps promising himself. Ben Mendelsohn plays Gerry, a Dubuque real estate agent who is behind on everything, and Ryan Reynolds is Curtis, the charming stranger Gerry decides is his lucky charm. Together they drive down the river toward a high-stakes game in New Orleans, stopping at dog tracks, riverboat casinos and backroom poker in Memphis and Tunica along the way.

Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck shot in working casinos, and the low-stakes grime is real. Anyone who has watched a friend double a bet because the last one lost will recognize Gerry inside five minutes, and the film is often compared with California Split, which sits higher on this list for reasons that become clear further up. Where it parts company with most good movies about gambling is the last half hour in New Orleans, which I will not spoil beyond saying that a big win arrives and changes nothing about the man holding it. Audiences wanted a different ending. Gerry was never going to get one.

9. Uncut Gems (2019)

IMDb 7.4/10 | RT critics 91% | RT audience 52%

An even wider split, 91 against 52, and this time the film earned it on purpose. Uncut Gems is exhausting by design. Adam Sandler plays Howard Ratner, a New York jeweler who owes money in every direction and treats each new debt as a reason to bet bigger, and the Safdie brothers shoot him the way a losing night feels, with everyone talking at once and no quiet moment in which to think. Howard bets on basketball rather than cards, and the film is set during the Boston Celtics’ 2012 playoff run, with Kevin Garnett playing himself.

The final wager is a three-leg parlay of $175,000 on Game 7 against Philadelphia: Celtics to win the opening tip, Celtics to win the game, Garnett over on points plus rebounds, for a payout of about $1.2 million. Any sportsbook regular knows the parlay is the house’s favorite bet, and the film knows it too. Sandler won the Independent Spirit Award for the role and was passed over by the Oscars. Of the movies about gambling addiction on this list, this is the one that comes closest to how the chase feels from the inside.

8. Owning Mahowny (2003)

IMDb 7.0/10 | RT critics 78% | RT audience 75%

Owning Mahowny is missing from most lists of the genre, and the omission says more about the lists than the film. The story is true and barely altered. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Dan Mahowny, the screen name given to Brian Molony, the assistant manager at a Toronto bank branch who moved roughly C$10.2 million out of customer accounts between 1980 and 1982 and lost nearly all of it in Atlantic City. It remains the largest one-man bank fraud in Canadian history, and Gary Stephen Ross’s book Stung is the source the film works from.

What makes it the best film ever made about a losing gambler is what it leaves out. There is no glamour and no system. Mahowny plays baccarat and blackjack in a cheap suit with a blank face, while John Hurt’s casino executive arranges the suite, the limousine and the steak dinner that keep the money arriving. That is how a casino host handles a whale in real life, and the film shows it without comment. The last scene, where a therapist asks him to rate the thrill of gambling against the best thrill of his ordinary life, is the quietest moment on this list and the hardest to shake.

7. Rounders (1998)

IMDb 7.3/10 | RT critics 63% | RT audience 87%

Critics were lukewarm in 1998 and the audience score shows how little that mattered. Rounders made about $22.9 million on a $12 million budget, a modest hit, then found its real following on DVD and in college dorm rooms. When the poker boom arrived five years later, Chris Moneymaker, the accountant whose 2003 World Series win set it off, credited the film with getting him into hold’em in the first place.

Matt Damon plays Mike McDermott, a law student with a gift for reading people who is pulled back into New York’s underground games when his friend Worm, played by Edward Norton, leaves prison owing the wrong people. Mike needs $15,000 in five days, which is how he ends up heads-up against John Malkovich’s Teddy KGB and his Oreo cookies. The tell is silly and the film knows it, but the rest of the poker holds up, from the bankroll talk to the line every player can recite about spotting the sucker in your first half hour at the table. Among poker movies it remains the one players quote at each other.

6. The Cincinnati Kid (1965)

IMDb 7.2/10 | RT critics 86% | RT audience 78%

Every poker film since has borrowed something from this one, usually the structure: the young hotshot, the aging champion, the one big game. Steve McQueen is the Kid, Edward G. Robinson is Lancey Howard, known as The Man, and the game is five-card stud in Depression-era New Orleans. Norman Jewison, who replaced Sam Peckinpah early in production, shot the final game like a boxing match, with the crowd leaning in and the dealer calling every card.

That last hand has been argued about for sixty years. Lancey makes a queen-high straight flush in diamonds against the Kid’s full house, aces over tens, and poker players still argue over whether the Kid misplayed it and whether two hands like that could ever land in the same deal. The film is not much interested in the probabilities. What the film gets right is the thing players recognize, that the real game is finding out whether you are as good as you believe, and The Man already knows the answer.

5. Molly’s Game (2017)

IMDb 7.4/10 | RT critics 82% | RT audience 84%

Aaron Sorkin’s first film as director is about the person who runs the game rather than the people who play it, a vantage point the best gambling movies of all time almost never take. Jessica Chastain plays Molly Bloom, a former skier who built the most exclusive private poker game in Los Angeles, first in the basement of the Viper Room and later in New York hotel suites, with movie stars, hedge fund managers and eventually men connected to the Russian mob at the table.

The real Bloom was charged in April 2013 alongside 33 others in a federal case against a gambling and money laundering ring, pleaded guilty to running an illegal gambling business, and in May 2014 received a year of probation, 200 hours of community service, a $1,000 fine and a $125,000 forfeiture. The poker itself mostly happens at the edge of the frame, which is why some players rank the film lower. What it shows instead is the business, the rake, the credit, the chasing of debts, the way a host learns which players put the game at risk. Anyone who has worked a casino floor will recognize that side of it.

4. California Split (1974)

IMDb 7.1/10 | RT critics 87% | RT audience 83%

Robert Altman’s gambling film is the one working gamblers tend to name when they are being honest. Elliott Gould and George Segal are two men who meet at a California card club, one a casual player and one a professional, and spend the film drifting from poker to the track to a boxing match to a Reno casino, drinking, borrowing and talking over each other the whole way. The screenwriter, Joseph Walsh, was a compulsive gambler himself, and it shows in details no outsider would write, like the way Segal’s character borrows from his girlfriend without quite asking.

The Reno ending is the reason the film is here. Segal goes on a run at the tables and finishes the night around $82,000 up, more than double the price of a new American home at the time, then splits the money with Gould and sits there feeling nothing at all. Altman does not explain the moment and does not need to. Fifty years on it remains the clearest picture on film of what happens when the money stops being the reason.

3. Croupier (1998)

IMDb 7.0/10 | RT critics 95% | RT audience 79%

The highest critics’ score on this list belongs to a small British film that barely got a release at home and then became an arthouse hit in the United States two years later, taking around $6 million there and more or less launching Clive Owen’s career. Owen plays Jack Manfred, a struggling novelist who takes a job dealing at a London casino and discovers that the material for his book is standing in front of him every night.

Director Mike Hodges shoots the casino from the dealer’s side of the table, which almost none of the other gambling movies here do. You see the chip handling, the pit boss watching the dealers watching the players, the rule against fraternizing with punters, the staff canteen, and the slow contempt a croupier develops for people who keep losing to him. Jack’s narration insists he never gambles, and the film quietly shows how untrue that is. For anyone who wants one title here that explains how a casino floor actually runs, this is it, and the top casino movies conversation is incomplete every time it is left out.

2. Casino (1995)

IMDb 8.2/10 | RT critics 79% | RT audience 93%

Some lists argue Casino is a gangster film rather than a gambling film. It is both, and it is the only film here that explains how a casino makes and moves its money. Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi built it on the real story of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who ran the Stardust and three other casinos for the Chicago mob in the 1970s without ever holding a license, and of Tony Spilotro, the enforcer who became a liability. Robert De Niro’s Ace Rothstein and Joe Pesci’s Nicky Santoro track their models closely, and the Tangiers stands in for the Stardust, with interiors shot overnight at the Riviera.

The count room scene, where the skim walks out the door in a suitcase, is the clearest explanation on film of how casino theft worked before modern casino security and gaming board oversight made it a far harder trick. The real Rosenthal survived a car bomb outside a Las Vegas restaurant in October 1982 and was later placed in Nevada’s Black Book, the regulator’s list of people banned from every casino in the state. Spilotro ended up in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.

Whether it tops the best casino movies ever made is a matter of taste. What is not in dispute is how closely it follows the record, and the Stardust, the Riviera and the other Las Vegas properties behind the Tangiers have a history worth knowing before a rewatch.

1. Casino Royale (2006)

IMDb 8.0/10 | RT critics 94% | RT audience 90%

Purists will object, and one well-known list calls Casino Royale a downright terrible gambling film. The poker is absurd. Ian Fleming’s novel had Bond at the baccarat table, the producers switched the game to Texas hold’em because that was what the world was watching in 2006, and the final hand in Montenegro is a straight flush beating a full house, which itself beats another full house and a flush, in a pot of about $115 million. Nobody who has played a hand of hold’em believes it.

It tops the list anyway, because the game is the whole plot rather than a set piece. A $10 million buy-in and $5 million rebuys are staked by the British government, there is a poisoning between hands, and the villain needs the money more than the hero does. The film treats table stakes as a weapon, which at the top end is exactly what they are. Daniel Craig’s first Bond sent more people to a card table than any film since Rounders, and the casino sequences, shot around Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, are the best-looking gambling scenes ever filmed. Among the greatest gambling movies, it is the one that cheats the most and gets away with it.

The Ones That Didn’t Make It

Ten slots leave out a lot of good gambling movies, including a few that top other lists. Every title below passed at least one of our three tests and failed another, and the reason is usually the interesting part.

Film	Why it missed
Ocean’s Eleven (2001)	The best heist film ever set in a casino, with no gambling in it. Emptying the Bellagio vault is not a bet.
Rain Man (1988)	The Caesars Palace blackjack sequence put card counting into popular culture, but it is one scene in a road movie.
The Hustler (1961)	Pool played for money is gambling in the strict sense, and it is a better film than several of our ten, but nobody searching for gambling films means pool.
The Sting (1973)	The fake betting parlor is the mechanism of a con, and the only person gambling is the mark.
The Gambler (1974)	James Toback’s semi-autobiographical script is brutal on addiction and James Caan is superb. It lost a close call to California Split from the same year.
Hard Eight (1996)	Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut has the best lesson on film about turning $150 into a comped room, but the gambling fades once the plot arrives.
The Cooler (2003)	A casino superstition, the house “cooler” sent to kill hot streaks, turned into a love story. Charming, and about luck more than play.
Bugsy (1991)	A film about building the Flamingo that invents most of its history, including a rained-out opening night that was in fact packed.
21 (2008)	The MIT blackjack team deserved better. The counting on screen is nonsense and the critics said so at 36%.
The Hangover (2009)	One Rain Man parody at a blackjack table does not make a gambling film, however funny.

What These Gambling Movies Have in Common

Count how many of these films end with the gambler ahead. Two, and both are fantasies, one about a law student who out-reads a Russian gangster and one about a spy with a government bankroll. The other eight are about people who are very good at something that is slowly taking them apart, and they were made by people who understood that. Casino and Croupier show the house’s side of the same arrangement, and it is no accident that those two feel most like documentary.

If a night in with the best movies about gambling leaves you wanting more, the television side of the genre has been catching up fast. The best books about gambling and betting get further inside the player’s head than any film can, and the same rule applies to all of them. The stories that last are never really about the money.