Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

adolescent Natasha Lyonne; her sexual curiosity is only sharpened by her deadbeat family's
transient lifestyle, hopping from one temporary accommodation to another. A long, long way
from 90210.
Small Faces
(Gillies Mackinnon, 1996)
British realism got a punch-in-the guts reboot in this period teenage gang drama, set in the
working-class highrises of Glasgow, 1968. Refracted through the lives of three brothers, it
centres on the story of the youngest, Lex (a sensational Iain Robertson), whose journey
through this gruelling teenage wilderness of street-level Scotland is a rite of passage rife with
the risk of peer pressure, beatings and much, much worse.
The Small World of Sammy Lee
(Ken Hughes, 1963)
Anthony Newley in an X-rated thriller? It happened, with the Laughing Gnome man playing a
strip-club compere needing to raise £300 to save himself from a beating. Amazing verite shots
of early 60s Soho punctuate Newley's sweaty quest for salvation.
Smiles of a Summer Night
(Ingmar Bergman, 1955)
Belying his reputation as a Scandinavian gloom-monger, Bergman made this delightful
country house drama. It is as light and playful as The Seventh Seal is dark and portentous.
Bergman being Bergman, though, there are some very caustic observations about love and
relationships amid the fun and frivolity.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
(David Hand, 1937)
The great personal, hands-on masterpiece of Walt Disney's career, based on the Grimm
fairytale, was also the first commercially successful feature-length animation in the Englishspeaking
world, a glorious piece of Technicolor film-making which astonished and entranced
everyone who saw it, including Chaplin and Eisenstein. The 33-year-old Disney created his
Snow White by first acting out the story for his 50-strong animation team in a private one-man
show which has passed into legend, lasting over three hours, doing all the characters'
movements and voices and expressions himself - a performance so vivid that it was the only
template the animators needed for three years' work. The resulting film was revolutionary.
Every frame of it was alive with detail and movement, and Disney developed the "multi-plane
camera" technique of many levels of drawing to create the illusion of movement and space -
still basically in use until superseded by computer-digital work. Although Disney delegated the
drawing work to his subordinate animators (almost like a Renaissance master with studio
assistants), he was passionately involved in every detail. Snow White's sisterly, motherly care
for her seven little friends is beautifully conceived, and each of these characters is an
individual creation, with a delicate, unthreatening kinship to the merry little animals, the birds,
fawns, rabbits and squirrels, with whom they are surrounded: giving rise to the inspired,
anthropomorphic concept of nature and the world that coloured almost every Disney cartoon,
and every other cartoon, that came afterwards.
Peter Bradshaw
Solaris
(Andrei Tarkovsky, 1972)
Tarkovsky's 160-minute science-fiction fable is generally regarded as part of a kind of
cinematic cold war - the Soviet answer to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey - and there are
undoubtedly grounds for comparison, mostly to do with the lofty intellectual ambitions that
both films pursue. But where Kubrick's film investigates technological development, Tarkovsky
turns his gaze inward, avoiding the space-tech fetishism in which sci-fi has traditionally
indulged. The film's source is the popular novel by Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, who
introduces the concept of "Solaristics", a future-science devoted to understanding a
mysterious star system with apparently untapped powers. Far from embroidering upon Lem's
pseudo-science, Tarkovsky uses it as a crutch for philosophical discussion: his film starts out