Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Eraserhead
(David Lynch, 1977)
A timid man is bewildered by family pressures and strange visions on the industrial fringes of
an unnamed city in Lynch's avant-garde debut. It conjures an eerie, hermetic unterworld,
riddled with dirty secrets and bizarre phenomena - a stage set for the most uncanny of
nightmares.
ET: the Extra-Terrestrial
(Steven Spielberg, 1982)
Spielberg's story of the little boy from a broken home who befriends an extra-terrestrial left
behind on Earth is a movie of passionate idealism and unapologetic faith in the power of love.
In this strange and beautiful love story lies the genesis of the Generation-X phenomenon: a
whole raft of people in the west growing up in a secular, affectless society, yearning to feel
reverence and rapture, and looking for love in the ruins of faith. We all know the story: ET is
orphaned by the departure of his spaceship, but a happy chance leads him to young Elliot
(Henry Thomas) who takes him in, feeds him, experiences ET's divine gift for healing, and
finally in an ecstatic mind-melding process, experiences a strange and divine state of grace.
They are united in their loneliness and vulnerability, and you simply don't have a pulse if you
don't feel your spine tingling and scalp prickling at Elliot's speech over ET's lifeless body: "I
don't know how to feel; I can't feel anything any more. I love you, ET." This is a brilliant film
about the alienated and powerless experience of being a child, yet it is a way of imagining
how a child would feel if it had an adult's freedom and responsibility. It is a visionary romance.
Peter Bradshaw
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
(Michel Gondry, 2004)
Charlie "Being John Malkovich" Kaufman proved he was no one-trick pony with this layered,
complex romance. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are especially good as the lovers who are
trying to forget; Gondry is whip-smart in the director's chair.
The Evil Dead
(Sam Raimi, 1981)
Raimi mixed DC Comics horror, nerve-jangling suspense, some pioneering no-budget
Steadicam and a million sick belly-laughs into one of the greatest homemade Hollywood
calling cards ever dreamed up.
The Exorcist
(William Friedkin, 1973)
The special effects may have dated, but this classic story of a little girl possessed by the devil
remains intensely scary. When her daughter begins to act up, Ellen Burstyn calls in the
services of Jesuit Max Von Sydow and the stage is set for a climactic confrontation between
good and evil.
Eyes Without a Face
(Georges Franju, 1960)
One of those films that you'd swear was made at least 20 years later than it actually was. A
plastic surgeon kills young girls to provide temporary face grafts for his disfigured daughter.
Coldly clinical and, in one memorable scene, explicitly gory. So much nastier than other early
60's horror films.
The Fabulous Baker Boys
(Steve Kloves, 1989)
The casual suavity of the Bridges brothers was caught, like lightning in a bottle, in this loungelizard
romance about a cocktail-bar duo whose act and personal lives are dragged apart when
a gorgeous wannabe chanteuse (Michelle Pfeiffer) joins the act. The subsequent ménage a