Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Sneering Nazis, impregnable fortresses, imprisoned generals, cable-car ascents ... Where
Eagles Dare takes bullet-riddled plot elements and constructs one of the most rousing of
second world war action films. That's mostly due to a sinuous, unusually well-managed plot,
lifted intact from Alistair Maclean's novel, allowing Clint Eastwood to chalk up the biggest
body-count in his oeuvre.
The White Balloon
(Jafar Panahi, 1995)
Few films portray kids as single minded as this. As a result it's one of the sharpest attempts
from a director to get into the mindset of a child. The young Iranian girl who spends most of
the running time trying to retrieve money from the drain so she can buy a goldfish isn't good
or bad. Or wise beyond her years. She's just childlike, which is what children obviously are.
White Heat
(Raoul Walsh, 1949)
Nearly 20 years after his first gangster roles, Jimmy Cagney was back as Cody Jarrett, the
meanest and craziest gangster of them all - except for his mother. A superb tribute to selfdestruction,
with Cagney exploding at the end and shouting "Made it, Ma! Top of the world!"
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
(Robert Zemeckis, 1988)
The Chinatown of animation uses the famous postwar plot to rid an increasingly automotive
city of its metro trains as the springboard for a million clashing concerns, not all of them
exclusively of interest to the under-nines. A technical landmark in the integration of live-action
and brilliant animation.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(Mike Nichols, 1966)
A censor-baiter that hastened the collapse of the Hays Code, Woolf remade Elizabeth Taylor
for her later, blowsier years and found the venom in an atypically retiring Burton, as Taylor's
semi-castrated, speccy academic husband George.
The Wicker Man
(Robert Hardy, 1973)
One to bring out the inner pagan in us all. This horror film - a true curio of cinema - ditches the
typical 70s Hammer gothic kitsch, dropping Edward Woodward's pious copper off on a sunworshipping
Scottish isle instead. Something indispensable happens to the tone en route: the
atmosphere is queerly heightened rather than just tense, and the gruesome finale bizarrely
uplifting.
The Wild Angels
(Roger Corman, 1966)
Peter Fonda won his counterculture spurs as the out-of-control gang leader of the Heavenly
Blues in this exploitation flick about a marauding gang of Hell's Angels. B-movie maestro
Corman amps up the irresponsibility, showing the Angels as a brawling, pill-popping, abusive
outfit, but their amorality is contagious, as evidence by the line sampled by Primal Scream
("We wanna be free..") for their hedonistic club anthem Loaded.
The Wild Bunch
(Sam Peckinpah, 1968)
Peckinpah's great western is a strictly a last-chance saloon affair: a gang of hunted outlaws
set in the dying days of the free west, made just as late-60s America was losing self-belief. So
it breathes elegiac desperation, from the opening scene of kids butchering scorpions to the
climactic Gatling-gun massacre, which made the director's name for prettified violence.
The Wild One
(László Benedek, 1953)
Source of the postwar biker mystique, the Wild One has a lot to answer for. Loosely based on