Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Shadows
(John Cassavetes, 1959)
A family portrait and an interracial love story, this was the sensational debut of the man who
would become the godfather of indie film. With a fantastic jazz score and fluid on-location
photography, the movie also introduces the volatile domestic dramas and identity crises that
would become touchstones of Cassavetes' career.
Shaft
(Gordon Parks, 1971)
Blaxploitation starts here, with esteemed Time photographer and novelist Gordon Parks
making his biggest hit and branding into our collective retina Richard Roundtree's two-fisted
loverman detective and mean-ass mother, in a world where the white man's taxicab won't
stop for a brother.
Shane
(George Stevens, 1953)
Buckskin-clad Alan Ladd is the reluctant gunfighter who rides in to town to defend the
homesteaders against a ruthless rancher and his hired gun - grinning Jack Palance. What
elevates the film is Shane's emotional ties with honest-toiler Van Heflin, his wife Jean Arthur,
and their boy, Brandon de Wilde: it's among the top fistful of westerns.
Shaun of the Dead
(Edgar Wright, 2004)
George A Romero comes to London's Crouch End in this funny zombie movie. Simon Pegg
stars as the slacker trying to win back his girlfriend while apocalypse rages, but Nick Frost
steals the film as his laidback drinking buddy helping to fight the undead with a very British
armoury of cricket bats, shovels and mug trees.
The Shawshank Redemption
(Frank Darabont, 1994)
Stately melodrama, based on a Stephen King novella, that is a moving study of hope and
friendship. Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman are the convicts who find redemption through
acts of common decency. Sentimental, for sure, but also a gripping, well-acted yarn.
She's Gotta Have It
(Spike Lee, 1986)
Lee's effervescent debut, telling the polysexual adventures of Nola Darling with great wit and
faultless sense of authenticity. It seems a long time ago now, but it was a genuine
breakthrough in independently-envisioned African-American cinema.
The Shining
(Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
Kubrick's last masterpiece, a deeply pessimistic consideration of modern man's capacity for
violence and bloodshed, underpinned by a soundtrack filled with threnodies to the dead of
Auschwitz and the gulag, and powered by a demented Nicholson performance. Also the first
great SteadiCam movie.
Shoah
(Claude Lanzmann, 1985)
Overwhelming 500-minute documentary that sought to record eye-witness testimony of the
Holocaust - no archive footage is used at any point - while the participants are still alive. In its
simple accrual of detail, it's a devastating riposte to anyone even flirting with the obscenity of
Holocaust denial.
Shock Corridor
(Samuel Fuller, 1963)
A journalist feigns mental illness to get himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital in order to