Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Day for Night
(François Truffaut, 1973)
Often regarded as the best film about film-making ever made. Truffaut himself stars as the
harassed, haggard director who is stuck making a brassy romance-drama called Meet
Pamela. On location, he has to keep everybody happy: Jacqueline Bisset is the beautiful
female lead; Jean-Pierre Léaud is the lovestruck actor with a crush.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(Robert Wise, 1951)
Sci-fi message-movie that explicitly takes aim at cold war paranoia, as eight-foot alien robot
Gort descends from the skies to warn humanity against the evil of nuclear weapons.
Notwithstanding cheapo 50s special effects, it's held together by an overpowering
earnestness that belied its lowly status.
Days of Being Wild
(Wong Kar-Wai, 1991)
A chain reaction of romance that reverberates around 60s Hong Kong is kicked off by a
drunken ex-hooker's confession. Days of Being Wild saw the first bright sparks of lionised
style-merchant Wong Kar-Wai: he manages to be both new-wave fresh and mesmerisingly
nostalgic, a conflicted match for characters bearing tear-stained memories in the maelstrom
of city life.
Days of Heaven
(Terrence Malick, 1978)
Shot entirely at the "magic hour", this lovers' tragedy is bathed in golden twilight and
grounded by a world-weary child's narration. Even amid the flames and violence of its late
scenes, the movie seems elusive and somehow unreal - like a dream confused with a
memory, or a memory confused with a dream.
Dazed and Confused
(Richard Linklater, 1993)
Linklater's beloved coming-of-age comedy shows the director's singular gift for the freeassociative
sidewinding of conversation, which here is given shape and momentum on the
last day of high school in 1976. The one-liners are priceless and the period soundtrack is
expertly curated.
Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid
(Carl Reiner, 1982)
Mind-boggling technical achievements are at the heart of Carl Reiner's uproarious spoof of
film noir, integrating footage from classics of the 40s to put Steve Martin's idiot detective in the
frame with figures as diverse as Bogart, Cagney, Ray Milland, Bette Davis, Burt Lancaster,
Kirk Douglas and Ava Gardner.
Dead of Night
(Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945)
With four directors handling five stories, this was one of the first and best of the compendium
horror films. As a whole, it's a little uneven in tone, but the weaker stories only appear so next
to the two classics on show here: a gothic chiller concerning a haunted mirror and Michael
Redgrave's tour-de-force as a ventriloquist struggling to keep his dummy in line.
Dead Presidents
(Albert Hughes, 1995)
After their calling-card gangsta drama Menace II Society, the Hughes brothers turned up the
heat with this retro heist movie that kicks off in the Bronx in 1968 but takes a turn for the
hellish when its charismatic lead (Lorenzo Tate) finds himself in 'nam. From here, the
Hugheses create a harsh but credible morality tale, as much about the US government's
abandonment of returning black soldiers as the issue of crime and punishment.