A surprisingly good true-crime film about the exploitation and the exploits of a group of NYC exotic dancers

The Lorene Scafaria writer/director film The Hustlers (2019) may not be Citizen Kane but it's a surprisingly good movie in a genre that more often than not is just plain exploitative and exhibitionist. Yes, it's a story about a group of exotic dancers in an NYC club catering to the Wall Street crowd; there are many scenes of near-nude dancing and foreplay, but to its credit the film puts these scenes into context by focusing (unlike, say, The Sopranos) on the suffering and exploitation of the women. In fact the women, reeling from the decline in business after the crash of 2008, set up their own little outfit, bypassing the club owners and others who chisel their money away. The plot may seem improbable, but the whole movie is based on a magazine article and is apparently quite true to the facts. The women - led by Jennifer Lopez, perfectly cast in her best film role in years - in essence pick up guys in bars, slip them drugs in a drink that knocks them cold, and steal their credit cards and other info, fleecing the guys of thousands of $s with reasonable confidence that the guys will never report these thefts - until eventually one (or 2) of them do so, leading to the arrest and downfall. Altogether, the movie is quite watchable right to the end - a rarity, today - and builds a lot of sympathy for these women who are by most measures straight-out criminals. Some of the scenes - notably the women in the club chatting and laughing among one another as they await the call onto the stage - are particularly well scripted and directed.