At the close of this Oscar winner about an unlikely New York friendship, male hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) takes his ailing con man pal Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) to Florida, only to have Ratso die on the way. Sunshine status: Best movie about the worst bus trip to Miami. This adaptation of his novel has an unforgettable meet-cute scene at a Belle Glade prison, in which escaping jailbird George Clooney jumps into a car trunk with FBI agent Jennifer Lopez and starts wooing her with movie talk. Sunshine status: Elmore Leonard is one of the poet laureates of Florida crime fiction. Augustine school for the deaf and blind and overcame family tragedies before hitting the road to becoming a music legend. Sunshine status: Jamie Foxx’s brilliant, Oscar-winning portrayal of Ray Charles, which covers his early years in north Florida, where he lost his sight, attended the St. Reporter Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) follows the Watergate money to Miami, where he links the Cuban-American burglars to President Nixon’s re-election campaign thanks to a tip by Dade County State Attorney’s investigator Martin Dardis (Ned Beatty). Sunshine status: Florida’s role in a president’s fall. John and Gena Rowlands to Shecky Greene and Rocky Graziano. Sunshine status: Sinatra and Miami Beach in the ring-a-ding ’60s: What more do you want? Frank plays a hard-boiled private detective who lives on a houseboat. “Goodfellas” also has a brief Florida scene, but it’s a memorable one: enforcers Robert De Niro and Ray Liotta threaten a late-paying gambler with death-by-lion at the Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa. Strictly as a film, the Oscar-winning “Godfather” sequel should be Top 5, but it only has a small scene set in Miami, where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) goes to visit his rival, Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg). Sunshine status: Mobsters are our underappreciated snowbirds, and these movies spotlight Florida’s importance to the Cosa Nostra lifestyle. THE GODFATHER PART II (1974) and GOODFELLAS (1990) Petersburg duffers finding a new Fountain of Life, courtesy of alien pods. Ron Howard’s appealing sci-fi fantasy has a condo of stereotypical St. Sunshine status: The ultimate Florida seniors movie - with a twist. >Related: Photo gallery - movies filmed in Palm Beach County It fictionalizes events surrounding the 1923 Rosewood massacre of blacks by a white mob, and was criticized for it by some, but the film is emotionally and devastatingly accurate in its depiction of Southern racism at its most virulent. Sunshine status: John Singleton’s movie is a reminder of Florida’s fraught history.

So here are The 30 Best Florida Movies, ranked. But, for this list, they had to be set in Florida, and they must reflect some essential aspect of the crazy-quilt, only in the Sunshine State experience. The best Florida movies aren’t necessarily filmed here - one was even made in England.

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