Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

All That Heaven Allows
(Douglas Sirk, 1955)
A textbook lesson in saying two (or more) things at once, Sirk's finest movie is both a lush
melodrama and a progressive social comment - not to mention something of a camp classic.
Jane Wyman plays a respectable widow who scandalously steps out with her beefcake
gardener (still-closeted Rock Hudson). No wonder it has been remade by both Fassbinder
(Fear Eats the Soul - no 159) and Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven).
All That Jazz
(Bob Fosse, 1979)
Song-and-dance man Fosse's grandly ambitious, autobiographical movie stars a rampant
Roy Scheider as the self-centred, manically driven, sex-and-death-obsessed Joe Gideon.
Giuseppe Rotunno's photography is superb and the choreography - particularly in the
hallucinatory operating room numbers - quite stunning: all in all, a hell of a testimony to
Fosse's wild talent.
All the President's Men
(Alan J Pakula, 1976)
The ink on Nixon's resignation letter was barely dry when this chronicle of the Watergate
scandal came out. Never did investigative journalism look so much like police work, as
reporters Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford piece together the political scandal through a
combination of patience, legwork, cunning and shady informants.
Alphaville
(Jean Luc Godard, 1965)
Ground-breaking sci-fi thriller/fable about a hard-boiled secret agent (surly Eddie
Constantine), who travels across space to the futuristic city of Alphaville, ruled by a giant
computer. It's Orwell's 1984 stylishly revisited in grainy black and white, warning us about
cyber-tyranny and the death of individualism.
Amadeus
(Milos Forman, 1984)
Peter Shaffer's smash stage-play, imagining a plot to murder Mozart. F Murray Abraham won
the best actor Oscar as the glowering Salieri, the court composer whose plodding, timeserving
mediocrity is brutally revealed by the blazing revelation of Mozart: a shrieking boor
who has done nothing to deserve his genius. A gripping tale which holds up well.
Les Amants Du Pont Neuf
(Leos Carax, 1991)
Brash, harrowing and melodramatic, Carax's movie created a sensation at the time. It is about
homeless people on Paris's Pont Neuf bridge: Juliette Binoche is Michele, an artist who is
going blind; Denis Lavant is the druggie street performer who falls for her, and then fears that
a new eye treatment could end her reliance on him. Watching it needs a sense of humour,
and a sense of absurdity.
Amelie
(Jean Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
Parisian life took on a fresh romantic sheen when Audrey Tautou's naive cafe waitress sets
out on a quest for love and beauty after finding a stranger's forgotten childhood treasure.
Jeunet's whimsical, neo-nostalgic blockbuster put Montmartre back on the map and
catapulted Tautou into stardom.
American Beauty
(Sam Mendes, 1999)
Crisply written, lustrous-looking satire on the American Dream. Kevin Spacey gives a wickedly
droll performance as self-confessed loser Lester Burnham, who quits his job and pitches
headlong into dope-smoking, iron-pumping, mid-life meltdown.