10 Greatest Con Artist Movies Of All Time, Ranked
Shawn S. Lealos is an entertainment writer who is a voting member of the Oklahoma Film Critics Circle. He has written for Screen Rant, CBR, ComicBook, The Direct, The Sportster, Chud, 411mania, Renegade Cinema, Yahoo Movies, and many more.
Shawn has a bachelor's degree in professional writing and a minor in film studies from the University of Oklahoma. He also has won numerous awards, including several Columbia Gold Circle Awards and an SPJ honor.
He also wrote Dollar Deal: The Story of the Stephen King Dollar Baby Filmmakers, the first official book about the Dollar Baby film program. Shawn is also currently writing his first fiction novel under a pen name, based in the fantasy genre.
To learn more, visit his website at shawnlealos.net.
The crime movie genre is full of different kinds of films and stories, but one of the most entertaining is the idea of con artists pulling scams and often getting away with them in the end. The best con artist movies often trick the audience as well as the people in the film, making this more of a story of how they did it, rather than a tale of who did it. That makes con artist movies one of the most satisfying types of heist movie.
The best part of watching a heist movie in any format is watching the plan play out. In a con artist movie, it is about watching the actual con unfold, with the misdirection and reversals all leading to a shocking reveal. Some con artist movies deliberately obscure the mechanics of the con, featuring more story about the people involved with the con as the plot device rather than the movie's actual focus.
Great con artist movies are such interesting stories that they lure in the best actors and filmmakers to attempt to deliver their version of the stories. Actors like Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Will Smith, and Leonardo DiCaprio have worked in the genre, alongside directors like Steven Spielberg, Rian Johnson, Ridley Scott, Peter Bogdanovich, and Preston Sturges. These con artist movies remain highlights of the genre.
10 Focus (2015)
Directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Focus stars Will Smith as Nicky Spurgeon, a veteran con man who mentors a novice grifter named Jess Barrett, played by Margot Robbie. The story picks up years later when the two of them reunite in a high-stakes con in Buenos Aires. This gives the movie a chance to show Nicky and Jess pulling a con at the start and then the more elaborate con later in the movie.
What really makes this con artist movie stand out is the escalating cons. The first is a jealous husband-catch scam, and then Nicky pulls a pickpocket and wallet swap scam at a major football game. This all leads to the main scam, which is a long con by Nicky on a wealthy racing-team owner. The film plays out with twists and turns and shocking reversals, making it a fun misdirection con movie.
9 Confidence (2003)
Released in 2003, Confidence is a movie directed by James Foley that stars Edward Burns, Rachel Weisz, Dustin Hoffman, Andy Garcia, and Paul Giamatti. This is a con artist movie about a crew of grifters who rip off a mob boss known as The King (Hoffman), and then they have to pay him back by conning a corrupt banker. The heist where they steal the mob boss's money is an accident, and they find themselves under his thumb.
This is a movie where the twists and turns really lift the film to another level. By the end, the entire story is revealed to be a long con where the grifters are working against both the banker and the mob boss, with allegiances seemingly twisting and turning, and no one being who they seem. It is a perfect tale of misdirection that plays out until the final scenes.
8 The Brothers Bloom (2008)
Rian Johnson has become the king of mystery movies with his Knives Out series of movies, but he directed a con artist movie years before starting this recent franchise. That film is The Brothers Bloom, and it stars Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo as con artist brothers who decide to pull one last job when they target a wealthy, eccentric shut-in heiress named Penelope (Rachel Weisz).
The main con in this movie is a convoluted long con that is built around book smuggling across several countries. The entire con is planned out by Stephen Bloom (Ruffalo), but things start to go wrong when his brother (Brody) actually falls for Penelope. This is a rare con artist movie where the cons drive the plot, but the real story is the relationship between the con artists.
7 Catch Me If You Can (2002)
Steven Spielberg directed the con artist movie Catch Me If You Can, which is based on Frank Abagnale Jr.'s semi-autobiographical book about his life. While many of the claims in the book and the movie have been disputed, that doesn't discount how entertaining the film and story are. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Frank, a man who starts as a teenage forger and impostor while an FBI agent, played by Tom Hanks, pursues him.
The con involves Frank cashing millions of dollars of fraudulent checks while impersonating different occupations, including a Pan Am pilot, a pediatric doctor, and a prosecutor in Louisiana. His cons are intricately planned, with fake credentials and uniforms, luring people into a false sense of trust. Christopher Walken earned an Oscar nomination for his supporting role as Frank's father.
6 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)
Frank Oz (Yoda in the Star Wars franchise) directed the 1988 con artist comedy movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. The movie is a remake of the 1964 film Bedtime Story, and it stars Steve Martin and Michael Caine as two con artists on the French Riviera who make a bet with each other and are competing to swindle a wealthy American heiress named Janet Colgate (Glenne Headly) out of $50,000.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels actually has the perfect twist ending for a con artist movie. While the entire film focuses on the two con artists working their magic to get the money, the actual con is playing out under the viewers' noses the entire time. The con here isn't about the two men at all, but about the heiress, who turns out to be the legendary con artist known as The Jackal, and the two men were her targets.
5 Paper Moon (1973)
Peter Bogdanovich is one of the greatest directors of his era, with several masterpieces to his name. The 1973 movie stars the father-daughter team of Ryan O'Neal and Tatum O'Neal as a grifting team. Moze is a small-time con artist in the Depression-era Midwest, and he reluctantly partners with the orphaned Addie to start to run more cons.
Moze and Addie run a Bible-selling racket by targeting widows, claiming their recently deceased husbands preordered the engraved Bibles. They guilt the widows into paying for the Bibles before moving on to their next target. The cons become more dangerous, and when Moze starts to get sloppy, he realizes that he is a danger to Addie. This is a movie more about their relationship than it is about the cons.
4 Matchstick Men (2003)
Ridley Scott directed his own con artist movie that was released in 2003. Matchstick Men stars Nicolas Cage as Roy, a con artist with severe OCD. He runs short cons with his partner, Frank (Sam Rockwell), and when a teenager (Alison Lohman) shows up and claims to be Roy's daughter, he agrees to another long con. Anyone familiar with con artist movies sees from the start that nothing is as it seems with this teenage girl.
The main cons involve Roy and Frank selling bogus water-purification systems, but the real con is the long con planned by Frank against Roy. Frank and a fake therapist bring in the teenager to con Roy and make him comfortable enough to reveal his bank safe-deposit box passcode. It is a rare movie where the con artist is the actual mark.
3 The Lady Eve (1941)
Written and directed by Preston Sturges, The Lady Eve stars Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. The plot follows a woman named Jean (Stanwyck) and her father (Charles Coburn), who target a wealthy, naive brewing heir named Charles Pike (Fonda). The con comes in the form of a rigged card-cheating scheme, but the twist comes when Jean falls in love with Charles.
The big move comes when Jean double-crosses her father to protect Charles, only to lose him when she admits who she is. This then leads to a revenge con where Jean reinvents herself as a fictitious aristocrat named Lady Eve Sidwich to reenter his life. This is more of a screwball comedy than a con artist movie, but the cons are still a big part of the story.
2 The Grifters (1990)
Stephen Frears directed The Grifters, a 1990 con artist movie produced by Martin Scorsese, who actually narrates the opening. John Cusack stars as Roy, a small-time con artist caught between his grifter mother Lilly (Anjelica Huston) and his long-con specialist girlfriend Myra (Annette Bening). The movie has Roy's original cons as small bar cons, where he switches out a larger bill for a smaller one to shortchange the register.
Lilly pulls off bigger cons, such as placing large track bets, manipulating the odds, and then skimming cash in the end. The long con, on the other hand, involves Myra's mentor staging an FBI raid to scare off a wealthy mark. This all leads to betrayals and twists where no one can trust each other, not even if they are family.
1 The Sting (1973)
The greatest con artist movie of all time is the 1973 George Roy Hill movie called The Sting. No other con artist movie can touch this cast, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford starring as two grifters who set out to gain revenge against a mob boss (Robert Shaw) who is responsible for the murder of one of their friends. The entire con here is to rip off the mob boss and then escape alive without anyone knowing any better.
The movie takes place in Depression-era Chicago in 1936, and the two men are able to vanish with the mob boss's money before he ever realizes he has been swindled and that the entire final climax was a staged scene where nothing was as it seemed. This is the greatest twist ending in any con artist movie, and the film went on to win seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
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