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The Sting
"The Sting" (1973), reuniting "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" stars Paul Newman and Robert Redford, follows two Depression-era con artists orchestrating an elaborate scheme to swindle a ruthless crime boss, winning seven Academy Awards including Best Picture. Its Scott Joplin-based ragtime musical score, arranged by Marvin Hamlisch and built around the piece "The Entertainer," triggered a significant mainstream revival of ragtime music's popularity decades after the genre's original early-20th-century commercial peak. The film's carefully structured plot, built around a series of escalating cons whose full mechanics are only revealed to the audience in the final act, established a template for the "elaborate reveal" con artist film structure that numerous subsequent films in the genre have directly followed. Its combination of its Best Picture-winning critical success and its genre-defining twist-reveal structure has made "The Sting" widely regarded as the greatest con artist film ever made.
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American Hustle
"American Hustle" (2013), directed by David O. Russell, loosely dramatizes the real 1970s FBI Abscam sting operation, following a con artist and his partner coerced into helping federal agents entrap corrupt politicians, earning ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Its ensemble cast, including Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Jennifer Lawrence, each received individual Academy Award nominations for their performances, an unusually complete sweep of acting recognition across a film's principal cast. The film's deliberately messy, morally ambiguous structure, in which nearly every character is engaged in some form of deception against nearly every other character, reflected the genuinely convoluted real Abscam operation more than a cleaner, more traditionally heroic con artist narrative would have. Its combination of its across-the-board acting recognition and its genuinely tangled, multi-directional deception structure has made "American Hustle" one of the most critically acclaimed con artist films of the 2010s.
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