Famous for its entertainment, excesses, nightlife, fine dining, mega-casino hotels, and hedonism, Las Vegas has thrived by providing its visitors and tourists with millions of opportunities to explore and indulge themselves in all kinds of sins earning it the Sin City title. In reality, Las Vegas is much more than this; it is seen as Hollywood’s most preferred location offering extravagance and glitz to the films set there. The very essence of Sin City is captured in the films provided on this list.
1. Rounders (1998)
Rounders is an extremely popular movie that centered that brilliantly captured gambling in Las Vegas in real-time. It was a real thriller about two characters who had a career playing poker games. These small-time were portrayed as Matt Demon and Edward Norton, who lived in New York City. Poker was the central theme of the film, and it was dominant in nearly every scene in the movie. Unlike the characters in the movie, US players tend to play with reputable Casino operators these days, and you can find online poker rooms for real money on AmericaGambles.
2. Casino (1995)
This is an outstanding film from Martin Scorsese, the specialist in creating gangster epics. Set mainly at the Riviera Hotel and Casino, this film takes us into the sincere heart of the Vegas of old, showing us how the mobs take over the town and how the 1970s Vegas operates. Martin Scorsese outlined the feel and looked of the decadence and corrupt Vegas of the 1970s. The most touching part of the movie is seeing the old casinos being destroyed and replaced with America’s baroque peasantry and Disney-styled toy castles. This movie tells the story of a casino manager Robert De Niro (Sam Ace Rothstein) and cannon mobster Joe Pesci (Nicky Santoro), who is an explosively delightful chap. The casino is one of the many Martin Scorsese’s awesome stories about the decadence and excesses of Las Vegas, followed by a fall.
3. Leaving Las Vegas (1995)
Spotting crude and dispirited persons are not so hard in Las Vegas, a city where people, fortunes, dreams, and almost everything comes to die. The city of Vegas comes alive at night with mad junkies, flat-busted gamblers, minatory hookers, and beggars. This movie tells the story of Nicholas Cage, who went to the Sin City to drink himself to death and met Vegas lifer Elisabeth Shue, the prostitute. This movie touched the Vegas all other Vegas movies missed by displaying a mix of rape, alcoholism, and total immiseration. Leaving Las Vegas was so symbolic that it won Nicolas Cage an Oscar award for his performance. Movies like Ocean’s Eleven offer you all the fun and glitz of Las Vegas, but Leaving Las Vegas gives you that hangover that never goes away.
4. Fear and loathing in Las Vegas (1998)
Set at Le Bistro Lounge at the Riviera Hotel and Casino, and Stardust Casino, Hunter S Thompson paints a savagely toxic picture of Las Vegas. Sin City’s activities were narrated explosively by Ralph Steadman. This movie shows you the psychedelic pasting of Vegas, which is filled with rightwing bogey figures, idiotic middle American squares and thrill-seekers, hallucinatory grotesques, and mindless gamblers, which makes you either hate Vegas or love Vegas. In ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ director Terry Gilliam gave Hunter S. Thompson an adaptation of drug-fueled misadventures, which shows a Las Vegas side that can’t be seen anywhere. Seen through the eyes of a hallucinatory journalist sent to cover a rally, the scene quickly dovetails as Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro strolled through the city under the influence of an alarming number of psychotropic drugs.
5. The Hangover (2009)
This movie perfectly exemplifies the saying ‘what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas’, which is the spirit of Vegas. The Hangover tells the story of Todd Phillips, who was having a bachelor party before his wedding with his friends. This party went awry when the groom could not be found after the accidental ingestion of roofies that happened the night before. The four friends woke up trying to picture the events of the previous night.