Deal is a poker drama filmed in 2008 and starring Burt Reynolds, Bret Harrison, and Shannon Elizabeth. The story revolves around a former poker player who sees a young emerging star in a televised online poker tournament and decides to take him as a protege and help him get to the World Poker Tournament. Poker has a long tradition of being used in movies for dramatic effect. When done right, these movies do a lot more than just showcase the game accurately. A great poker movie gives viewers a sense of poker subculture, and how it affects those who play it. Loosely defined, there are probably hundreds of ‘poker movies’. Poker films are rarely outright comedies, but in the case of Zak Penn's 2007 film The Grand, he collected an ensemble of poker-loving celebrities to participate in a totally improvised mockumentary setting. Almost all of the dialogue was made up on the spot. Former Olympian Molly Bloom ran a high-stakes poker game for the stars - until her lofty lifestyle nearly sent her to prison. Starring: Jessica Chastain, Idris Elba, Kevin Costner Watch all you want. A list of movies related to Gambling and/or poker. This list is made for the users of the Gaming community www.GamingHill.com where you can find a lot of more Gambling related stuff (tools, reviews, entertainment, games, forums etc).

Poker and Cinema have a long-standing relationship, especially in the Hollywood tradition. Like chess, it is a game that lends itself to thematic metaphor and character traits. The macho-man goes all-in, the coward folds, the maverick bluffs, the slick hero always has a winning hand.

Unfortunately, the relationship between film and poker does not always bear the sweetest of fruit. Also like chess, poker on the silver screen is often horribly unrealistic, or just plain bad. The royal flush is as ubiquitous on screen as the one move check-mate, and other films have cards games that entirely fail to serve the story they are a part of.

In amongst the dross, however, there are a few examples of excellence. Here is a countdown of my top 5 poker clips and why they work:

5. Final Hand of The Cincinnati Kid (1965).

This is a highly controversial scene (It starts at 22:40 in the video). Two implausibly large hands are up against each other, and in five-card stud, as well, a game in which medium-pairs can often be the winning hand at showdown. But despite its lack of realism on that front, the hand deserves to make this list for a number of reasons.

The first being that the film was the Rounders of its day: the one popular film that gave your average square an insight into the underground world of gambling. Like Rounders, the film is close enough to reality to be fascinating to the curious and the drama is heightened to a sufficient degree that it will keep the attention of the popular audience. It is much more pleasant than Robert Altman’s still excellent, but more niche, offering: California Split, where the bleak degeneration of the gamblers is painfully, off-puttingly real.

The second is its execution as a piece of cinematic drama. The Kid, played by Steve McQueen, has been beating Lacey Howard (Edward G. Robinson) for a full montage, when he’s dealt the Tc up, against Howard’s 8d and the two get into a raising war.

As the stakes rise, the tension is provided by the audience on screen. They gasp and mutter; after a few more bets, they start talking to each other or under their breath (read: to the audience) about the possible outcomes, the possible hands. It gives the viewer all the information the non-poker player needs, and puts us right there in the room with them.

Thirdly, those hands, the unlikeliness of which – and the fact that the dealer is called ‘Lady Fingers’ – have led most poker-players to conclude the game was rigged. If true, it puts a different spin on the final words of Lacey Howard. Is the Kid really second best?

The debate has a whole life beyond the film which, in and of itself, is a recommendation towards being on the list.

Finally, the main reason the scene makes the list is because of the perfect way two deadpan people sitting at a table playing cards is turned into something dramatic. It is a great example of the card game as an action scene. It certainly beats having four silent players slow roll-each other one after another à la Casino Royale.

4. The Judge's game from Rounders (1998).

Another great use of poker is as competence porn. We love to see something done well, and this scene, more than any other, exemplified that. It was this scene that made me – a teenager obsessed with Derren Brown, House M.D., and The Mentalist – want to get into poker.

The hand starts at 5:10 in the video, and shouldn’t need much introduction to a poker audience like yourself, though if you somehow haven’t seen Rounders do go read Bradley Chalupsky’s review elsewhere on the site.

The hand itself is largely irrelevant to the scene, the judges are playing and ex-rounder Mike McDermott (played by real life amateur poker player Matt Damon) is watching, having delivered some legal documents to his professor who is playing. He can’t resist getting a little involved and after goading his professor into some aggressive play, he responds to some heckling by reading everyone’s hands blind.

It show’s off his wasted talent and the character’s nostalgia for the game we’ve seen him quit, but its real impact is in impressing the audience. We’re all suckers for stuff done well by characters we like, and there is a twinge of aspiration in us that makes us want to be able to do that trick.

The usual way to show us someone is good at poker is either by having them showing down a massive hand (think George Clooney’s line in the remake of Ocean’s Eleven: ‘I don’t know what the four nines do, but the ace is pretty high.’) or by having them picking up on some ludicrously specific and obvious tell, ‘Barry, you always scratch your arse with your left pinky whenever you hit a flush, mate.’ I think we can agree this is rather more elegant.

3. Cool Hand Luke gets his name.

So the last two clips show how Poker can be a source of drama, or a way to impress the audience, but it can also be used to reveal character, or emphasise a movie’s themes, as in this scene from Cool Hand Luke (1967).

The film deals with the incarceration for petty vandalism of Luke, a sort of rebel without a cause played by ol’Blue Eyes: Paul Newman. Luke is an enigmatic character who seems in some way to act without real motive, his actions driven by a sort of pigheaded unwillingness to be unfree. In this scene poker is used in a pleasingly ambiguous way to draw this out.

Dragline, the man behind Luke’s opponent, takes an amusingly domineering role. The hand plays out in a way that reinforces his growing respect and imminent friendship with Luke. In a previous scene they came to fisticuffs.

But is Luke’s bluff just hot-headed LAG-iness, or a moment of cool-headed manipulation? The ambiguity is central to his character whose occasionally bizarre acts of defiance seem both pointed and pointless by turns. How cool he really is is always in question.

2. The final countdown in God of Gamblers (1989).

This clip is here for sheer balls to the wall flashiness and flare. God of Gamblers stars Chow Yun-Fat as Ko Chun, a man with a supernatural ability to cheat at gambling games, a fact which is widely known and somewhat celebrated in the weird fantasy world of the movie.

After a second act diversion in which Ko Chun loses his memory and spends an hour or so of the film helping a small time hustler win at cards in return for chocolate, he returns to the ring for this high-stakes showdown against sinister crooks on a luxury yacht:

The game is great fun to watch just for all the world building details.The cards are spread on a ludicrously long table, and then dealt as if from a shoe. Instead of chips, the bets are made in blocks of cash lifted by henchmen from suitcases full of dollars. Everyone wears black tie fromal, and the whole thing is set to an instrumental of Europe’s “The Final Countdown”. Even the way they check their cards is idiosyncratic.

Everything is just there to look cool, and it broadly works. Even the final cheat/counter-cheat reveal is a ludicrously ramped up version of the similar scene in The Sting.

The scene makes the list for turning the quiet drama of a poker game into something of a pageant, and for, quite simply being immensely good fun.

1. The 7-2 bluff in Stuey (2003).

Also known as High Roller: The Stu Ungar Story, Stuey is the trueish story of two time WSOP Champion, degenerate gambler, and coke addict: Stu Ungar.

This final hand on this list does it all, it is competence porn, dramatic, thematic, interesting and realistic (in that it actually happened), and shows the possibilities of poker far better than any number of bluff vs. full-house hands.

It comes as a short aside about how out of their depth the fish are when they come to Vegas. It lacks the flash, and even the high stakes of the other hands on this list, but it is a great hand, and a relatively quiet example of good storytelling.

I’ll leave you with the clip.

There are a ton of great poker moments out there, from movie’s big and small. Some from films that aren’t even about poker. The lowball game in California Split, for realism, the final hand of Maverick for mysticism, Rusty trying to teach poker in Ocean’s Eleven for comedy, and Shade and The Sting for portrayals of cheats.

Let me know any of your favorites that I might have missed in the comments.

Poker Night, released in the UK as The Joker, is a 2014 crime thriller film that was written and directed by Greg Francis.^[1] The film was released to video on demand on 5 December 2014 and had a limited theatrical release on 20 December.^[2][3] Filmed in British Columbia, Poker Night centers upon a rookie detective that decides to attend an annual poker night held by veteran police officers, where each one details how they captured a murder suspect.^[4]

Plot[edit]

Stan Jeter (Beau Mirchoff) is a new detective who gets invited to play a game of poker with several veteran police officers and detectives. Each one tells Stan about various insights they gained from different murder cases they investigated, which turns out to be invaluable when Stan is captured and imprisoned by a vicious, anonymous assailant (Michael Eklund). He finds that he has been imprisoned with Amy (Halston Sage), the daughter of a police officer, and that he must use the stories of his fellow poker players to find a way for both himself and Amy to escape.

Cast[edit]

• Beau Mirchoff as Stan Jeter
• Ron Perlman as Calabrese
• Giancarlo Esposito as Bernard
• Corey William Large as Davis
• Titus Welliver as Maxwell
• Halston Sage as Amy
• Ron Eldard as Cunningham
• Michael Eklund as The Man
• Kieran Large as Shawn Allen

Release[edit]

Home media[edit]

Poker Night was released on DVD and Blu-ray by Xlrator on February 10, 2015.^[5]

Critical response[edit]

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Poker Night holds an approval rating of 50%, based on 10 reviews, and an average rating of 5.39/10.^[6] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 35 out of 100, based on 5 critics, indicating 'generally unfovorable reviews'.^[7]

Poker Film Romanesc

Dennis Harvey of Variety gave the film a negative review, writing, 'Poker Night offers a near-indigestible mix of tricky Pulp Fiction-esque structural convolution, torture-porn tropes and a somewhat distasteful level of snark, making for a self-satisfied puzzle that most viewers will run out of patience trying to unravel.'^[8] Martin Tsai from Los Angeles Times offered the film similar criticism, stating that the film 'brings to mind so many forgettable thrillers from the 1990s, films that aimed to impress stylistically but ultimately were met with indifference.'^[9] Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter, although commending the film's acting, and 'somewhat anthology feel', criticized the endless voicover narration, 'jumbled timeline', and devolving to genre tropes. Scheck concluded his review by writing, 'Although it features plenty of entertaining moments along the way, in the end Poker Night feels like a cheat.'^[10] Patrick Cooper from Bloody Disgusting felt that the film showed promise and featured good performances, but was ruined by its nonlinear narrative, and inconsitant tone.^[11]

The film was not without its supporters. Matt Donato from We Got This Covered awarded the film three and a half out of five stars, writing, 'Poker Night is a 'wild card' watch, but Greg Francis flashes a winning hand by making a memorable monster out of Michael Eklund.'^[12] Matt Molgaard from HorrorFreakNews rated the film a similar three and a half out of five stars, writing, 'Poker Night may not satisfy those in search of the goriest film of the year, but anyone up for a unique viewing experience, a strong cast and a damn sharp villain are going to find Poker Night to be more than simply adequate.'^[13] Matt Boiselle of Dread Central gave the film four out of five stars, commending the film's performances, interwoven stories, and villain.^[14]

Poker Film

References[edit]

1. ^Patten, Dominic. ''Revolution's Giancarlo Esposito Joins Indie 'Poker Night''. Deadline. Retrieved 25 December 2014.
2. ^Woods, Kevin. 'Trailer and key art for Greg Francis' Poker Night, starring Ron Perlman'. JoBlo. Retrieved 25 December 2014.
3. ^Hunter, Rob. ''Pioneer' and 'Poker Night' Both Start With 'P' and Open This Friday, But Are They Thrillers Worth Seeing?'. Film School Rejects. Retrieved 25 December 2014.
4. ^Harvey, Dennis. 'Film Review: 'Poker Night''. Variety. Retrieved 25 December 2014.
5. ^'Poker Night (2014) - Greg Francis'. Allmovie.com. Allmovie. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
6. ^'Poker Night (2014) – Rotten Tomatoes'. Rotten Tomatoes.com. Fandango Media. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
7. ^'Poker Night reviews'. Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
8. ^Harvey, Dennis. ''Poker Night' Review: A Losing Hand – Variety'. Variety.com. Variety Magazine. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
9. ^Tsai, Martin. 'Review: 'Poker Night' deals a poor hand with few high cards - Los Angeles Times'. LATimes.com. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
10. ^Scheck, Frank. ''Poker Night': Film Review'. HollywoodReporter.com. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
11. ^Cooper, Patrick. '[Review] 'Poker Night' Builds Up and Tears Itself Down - Bloody Disgusting'. BloodyDisgusting.com. Bloody Disgusting. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
12. ^Donato, Matt. 'Poker Night Review'. WeGotThisCovered.com. We Got This Covered. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
13. ^Molgaard, Matt. 'Poker Night (2014) Review'. HorrorFreakNews.com. Horror Freak News. Retrieved 5 November 2019.
14. ^Boiselle, Matt. 'Poker Night (2014) - Dread Central'. DreadCentral.com. Dread Central. Retrieved 5 November 2019.

External links[edit]

Poker Filmek

• Poker Night at AllMovie
• Poker Night at IMDb
• Poker Night at Metacritic
• Poker Night at Rotten Tomatoes

Poker Film Youtube