Movies are a great form of entertainment due to the thrilling actions and captivating drama. But casino movies take the action to a whole other level due to the portrayal of the casino lifestyle, showcasing the electric and high-octane atmosphere of gambling structures.

If you have never seen a casino movie or wish to update your playlist, then look no further. Here are ten casino movies that will blow you away.

Ocean’s Eleven

The movie focuses on Danny Ocean and his team who target and successfully execute a plan to steal from the three major casinos in Las Vegas. The three casinos are the Bellagio, the MGM Grand and the Mirage.
The movie shows the elegance and class of the three top casinos in Las Vegas and the daring actions of the main characters is a true credit to the gambling world.

Casino Royale

This classic James Bond movie is sure to keep all casino lovers at the edge of their seats. The climax of the film is marked by a high-stakes poker game between Bond and Le Chiffre. The game portrays the true nature of a casino game and with international security at stake, this film takes poker to a new dimension.

7 rounders

This movie tells the story of a law student who is forced back into a life of gambling when his friend is indebted to a ruthless Russian mobster. The film shows the main character’s talent and skill in poker and its great lesson for anyone who wants to learn how to play.

Rain Man

The film shows how two brothers, one an autistic savant and the other a businessman. The two brothers travel to Vegas with the idea of using Raymond’s gift to win big at the blackjack tables.

Croupier

This film shows the casino life from the perspective of a croupier who is played by Jack Manfred (Clive Owen). It shows how the under-the-table dealings between a gambler and the croupier get out of hand giving the casino life a chilling tone away from the glamor commonly associated with Vegas.

21

This movie follows the noble cause of Ben Campbell who enters a life of gambling in order to get enough money for his tuition fees. Campbell’s math’s professor invites him to join a group of special individuals and together they travel to various casinos in Las Vegas.
The group uses their math counting skills to win lots of money at blackjack tables.

Casino

This film contrasts the glamor and elegance of the casino life with the cruel dealings that happen behind the scenes. It follows the life of Sam Ace Rothstein (Robert De Niro), a casino operator who is well connected to the mob. Rothstein lives a very civilized life with his wife. However, things soon get disrupted when Nicky Santoro (Joe Pesci) arrives in town with an ambitious plan.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

This movie shows the life of Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp) as he takes a trip to Vegas in the company of his Samoan lawyer. Thompson has received a huge advance to cover a sporting event and decides to take a trip in search of the American Dream.

The Gambler

This movie shows the life of a professor who is a gambling addict who spends much of his time in casinos. The movie serves as a warning to getting too much of the casino gambling world as the gambler plunges into self-destruction.

The Cincinnati Kid

The film tells the story of a talented gambler who uses his skills to play against the high roller of the day. The film shows the nature of competition that exists in gambling especially in casinos and the high stakes that are involved in every game.

You can get more at online information at RouletteGambler.co.uk.

La Chienne (1931)

Literally, “The Bitch,” Jean Renoir’s second sound film was a success partly because of a tragedy that occurred before its release. In the film, a painter falls for a prostitute after saving her from being abused by her pimp. However, the painter learns the prostitute loves her for another reason, leading to a tragic climax and coincidence, something almost copied in real life. It’s a love triangle playing on the themes of wealth, deceit, and poetic justice, which is what makes the aftermath sad yet poetically justified to happen.

Janie Marèse played the prostitute and it was her third film, which garnered her acclaim. Michel Simon played the painter and Georges Flamant played the pimp in his first film; both fell in love with Marèse, but it was Flamant that won her heart. After filming, the couple went out on vacation and a car accident killed Marèse. Simon, devastated by her death, threatened Renoir with a gun, blaming the film for her death. It is reported that Renior responded, “Kill me if you like, but At the same time, I have made the film.” Simultaneously, it ended Renoir’s first marriage when, allegedly, Renoir hired Marèse over his wife for the role and felt betrayed by her husband. Like in the film, love can kill people while innocent others get punished and only Renoir reaped all the benefits. In 1945, it would be remade in America as Scarlet Street starting Edward G. Robinson and directed by German auteur Fritz Lang.

Ugetsu (1953)

Outside of Kurosawa and Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi is among the finest filmmakers from Japan that have played a major influence in the West. Ugetsu is a mix of romance and fantasy that features criticisms of war, the real relations the Japanese have with spirits, and family duty. Here, a peasant farmer leaves his wife and son during a brutal civil war for greed, only to be taken in by a spirit that seeks to ruin him in the process. The camera seduces us into any mist like the misguided farmer and Fumio Hayasaka creates a score that tingles the skin with its traditional sound that keeps the mood of the story within classical Japanese dance-drama known as Kabuki. This and The Life of Oharu were the first films, while Japanese cinemagoers thought of as old fashioned, made Mizoguchi recognized in the eyes of Cahiers du Cinema and the film listed on Sight & Sound’s Top 10 poll in the 60s and 70s.

Tom Jones (1963)

Tony Richardson’s Oscar-winning comedy of unusual making and side commentaries of an attractive, flirtatious man in 18th Century England is a total charmer and perfect transformation within the British New Wave. After black-and-white films about the “angry young man,” Richardson and screenwriter John Osbourne takes the famous 1749 novel and creates a film similar to what the French were doing in the years before. An intro made like a silent film, the fourth wall broken, create camera shots and editing to enhance major scenes, and a narrator we never see add up to the anti-romantic ways of storytelling in this era. But Albert Finney is perfect in the title role and the transition from a scruffy blue-collar worker in Saturday Night And Sunday Morning to a charming aristocratic man completed his worldwide sex appeal.

Mala Noche (1985)

Gus Van Sant’s breakthrough is a scruffy on-the-cheap story from poet Walt Curtis’ autobiography. Van Sant related to Curtis has a gay man living in Portland, Oregon, but Curtis’ off-beat, bohemian-like style of life is a worthy character just like Van Sant’s biopic in Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. However, “Bad Night” as its translated deals with Curtis’ desire to attract a young, handsome Latinx man named Johnny. It is a plot loosened around the openness of everyone’s homosexuality that is not judgmental that they live on the city’s Skid Row. For $25,000 in black-and-white and shooting wherever they could, Van Sant’s debut is a pure understanding of complicated relationships regardless of sexual orientation and afflicting cross-cultures.

Bottle Rocket (1996)

The genius of Wes Anderson began with a black-and-white short four years earlier before James Brooks helped finance his first feature with both Owen and Luke Wilson plus close friend Robert Musgrave and James Caan. It took 2 years to edit and shorten their script for a 90-minute screwball comedy caper that captures misfits seeking to thrive as thieves, even when they are really a danger to themselves in their dumb ways. The short was in Sundance, but Sundance turned it down and the film was a commercial failure. But critics liked it and a cult following began that let Wes Anderson and crew keep with their original work in Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and all the way to their upcoming The French Dispatch.

Yi Yi (2000)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U089cG2BqR8

The last film from Edward Yang before his death is about the generations of a family in Taiwan who are captured in a wedding, funeral, and all sectors of life with dramatic episodes in different ages. The youngest child is bullied and school and finds solace in photography, the father finds himself in a moral crisis where money equals happiness but really wants something else to come out of a successful business venture, the mother is having a midlife crisis and is away from them as one of the matriachs lies comatose. In the top 10 of BBC’s Greatest 21st Century films, Yi Yi (“one by one”) is a tapestry of a family ensemble and the troubles of regular life.

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From 1939 to 1972, Englishman Michael Powell and Hungarian émigré Emeric Pressburger collaborated on 24 feature films. Some of them would be duds, others would be classics forever part of the influencing generation of movies that many directors would cite later. The first film they worked on was 1939’s The Spy In Black directed by Powell with Pressburger hired by legendary film producer, Alexander Korda, to do script rewrites. That would follow with two more anti-Nazi movies, Contraband (1940) and 49th Parallel (1941), both directed by Powell and scripted by Pressburger, who would win the Academy Award for Best Story – it was separate from Screenplay back then – for the latter film. (The legendary DP Frederick Young and director David Lean also worked on the film starring Lawrence Olivier, Leslie Howard, and Anton Walbrook, and garnered a Best Picture nomination.)

With these consecutive successes, Powell and Pressburger decided to forge an official partnership for their next film, 1942’s One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing, and adopted the name, The Archers. The following year, in the opening credits labeled as Archers Film Productions, the distinguished archery bullseye was seen with the joint credit “Written, Produced and Directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger.” The launch of their successful enterprise would produce consecutive hits.

The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp (1943)

Although no one is named Blimp, no one actually dies, and the title comes from a popular comic strip, it was an attractive way to get people come over and watch in beautiful Technicolor the romantic war satire about a General and a Prussian officer who fall in love with the same woman three times (all played by Deborah Kerr) in the span of forty years, from the Boer War (1899-1902) to the First World War to the Blitz at the start of the Second World War. The film is positive to British forces, but many including Winston Churchill were deeply concerned about how the film portrayed officers and gave some sympathy to a German one and objected to them using actual military uniforms and vehicles. But it was a success when released and reanalysis sees the film, as Stephen Fry put it, “what it means to be English.”

A Canterbery Tale (1944) / I Know Where I’m Going (1945) / A Matter Of Life And Death (1946)

The next three were low-key romances more homely to the countryside and attached to the country’s aftermath of the war. The first followup was A Canterbury Tale, the story of three individuals who find themselves salvaging the land they are lost in to get the Canterbury and speaking of Anglo-American unity while the war rages on. In I Know Where I’m Going, an independent woman finds herself trapped on an island during a storm while heading to meet her fiancee. On the island, she soon finds herself attracted to a naval officer who is a descendant of a family curse that haunts an old castle, and he wants her to stay with him. It is romantic and magical and done in black-and-white with limited resources. They shot on location at the Isle of Mull, giving the story authenticity of the stunning scenery surrounding them.

Finally came A Matter of Life and Death, a romantic fantasy which can be argued as similar to Here Comes, Mr. Jordan, a film remade in 1978 as Heaven Can Wait. In this case, it’s a fighter pilot (David Niven) who speaks to a female radio operator as his plane is going down and should die. However, the designated interceptor to bring him to the Other World fails to catch him, and the pilot is shocked to be alive. But the dead guides try to convince the pilot he actually has to be dead, but is falling in love with the radio operator, the pilot now has to appeal a jury of dead descendants that he deserves to live longer. The mix of Technicolor on Earth and black-and-white in the Other World mixed with the scale of the sets that The Archers kept expanding into their larger-than-life stories.

Black Narcissus (1947) / The Red Shoes (1948)

Returning to gorgeous Technicolor, The Archers would make two bold films that would define them in their work and in their vivid creativity with enchanting backgrounds and eventually be considered among the best British films in history. Both were shot by Jack Cardiff who won for Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes would get a Best Picture nomination and win Oscars for Original Score and Art Direction. These are both films about the senses, one in the Himalayas with nuns and the other about the love triangle surrounding a beautiful ballet dancer in which, like the fairy tale from Hans Christian Anderson, she becomes befallen to certain powers. Obsession is key to both and the rich color they use is still among the best use of cinematography in the world.

In Black Narcissus, a covenant is established to help the locals establish a school and a hospital with the support of a young prince in the region. But the beauty of their surroundings in isolation conjures up the feeling of sensual jealousy with the nuns and a handsome British officer present. In The Red Shoes, a Russian dance impresario hires an unknown dancer and a music student whose original score was copied for his recent show. It installs the bitter rivalry between musician and businessman over the new sensation being found on the stage. She was a swan and her end is a beautiful swan dive invested in the power of her magical shoes.

Later Films And Dissolvement

Their works in the 1950s did not achieve much success. David Niven was forced by MGM to do The Elusive Pimpernel and Gone To Earth had Powell & Pressburger butt heads with producer David Selznick who disliked the final product for British release, but had the rights to re-edit, reshoot, and retitle the whole picture known as The Wild Heart, which was also disastrous. Even though The Battle Of The River Plate and The Tales of Hoffmann brought some acclaim and was directly cited by George Romero as, “the movie that made me want to make movies,” by 1957, with the failure of Ill Met By Moonlight, the two agreed to part ways creatively but were friends for the rest of their lives. They would reunite as Pressburger would write two Powell-directed films not labeled as The Archers, They’re A Wired Mob (1966) and The Boy Who Turned Yellow (1972).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neG9BjI2EAg

In 1981, the duo were awarded the BAFTA Fellowship Award, a lifetime achievement for their contributions to British cinema. Emeric Pressburger died in 1988, aged 85; Michael Powell followed in 1990, aged 84. For the last six years of his life, Powell was married to Martin Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who currently runs his estate and works with Scorsese, a longtime fan of The Archers, to preserve their work. Time Out’s 100 Best British Films included six films on their list, The Red Shoes (#6) and A Matter of Life And Death (#7) in the Top 10. Four of them would be on BFI’s Top 100 and The Red Shoes peaked the highest at #9. (Powell’s controversial Peeping Tom, made after the two split up, was also listed.) The Archers remain a source of inspiration with their achievement in color films, fantasy stories, and the power of infusing two minds into one for a massive partnership unseen at the time.

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