Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Ginger Snaps
(John Fawcett, 2000)
Neat title, that - the Ginger in question is an eye-rolling teenager who falls victim to both the
onset of menses and a mysterious hairy beast, with spectacular consequences. This smart
Canadian horror film uses the werewolf legend to express the anxiety, alienation, and raging
hormones of adolescence.
Gladiator
(Ridley Scott, 2000)
Russell Crowe is a suitably meaty presence in this sword-and-sandals spectacular. The epic
blood-and-guts battle scenes are breathtaking and the legendary Oliver Reed makes his final
performance as the gladiatorial showman. Terrifically entertaining.
Glengarry Glen Ross
(James Foley, 1992)
A pummelling translation of the David Mamet play, Glengarry Glen Ross sets four Chicago
real-estate salesmen at each other's throats in a microcosm of American capitalism. Mamet's
muscular argot is handed around the cast like testosterone supplements, and it's fascinating
to see the macho ensemble - Pacino, Lemmon, Arkin, and Ed Harris - fight their corners with
it.
Gloria
(John Cassavetes, 1980)
Against her wishes, a hard-boiled dame with former mafia connections becomes caretaker of
an endangered little boy after his parents are murdered by the mob. The tidy premise - tough
broad paired with adorable orphan - is given welcome rough edges by John Cassavetes'
direction and Gena Rowlands' full-blooded performance.
The Go-Between
(Joseph Losey, 1970)
Before Merchant Ivory turned them into a formula, this is the way Edwardian period movies
used to look: mighty essays on class and repression as well as febrile evocations of a rural
English landscape that had, even then, almost totally vanished. LP Hartley's 1953 novel - with
its imperishable opening lines, "The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there"
- accentuates the gulf between the pre-first world war summer, and a Britain that was just
about to enter the socio-sexual revolution of the second half of the 20th century. His narrative
focuses on the traumas suffered by a young boy whose guilt at spilling details of a cross-class
love affair results in a catatonic condition. By the time American exile Joseph Losey made the
film, the 1960s had battered away most of the Edwardians' taboos, and the crisis of ideas had
abated. But there was plenty of room to create the film as a counterpoint to that poetic
opening; the presence of two very starry British actors - Julie Christie and Alan Bates - at the
height of their powers stresses a continuity between turn-of-the-century Norfolk and the
modern day. The Go-Between was Losey's third collaboration with Harold Pinter (after The
Servant and Accident), and in many ways the most orthodox. Nevertheless, Pinter did insert
flash-forwards and the like to create a fractured sense of chronology that reflected the novel's
later-life perspective. Losey, ever the observant exile, luxuriates in the period detail, but never
allows the surfaces to become too glossy. He knew, first and foremost, that this was a story
about people, and a great one at that.
Andrew Pulver
The Godfather
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)
The potency of the organised-crime genre was massively re-established by this family epic: a
locus classicus for 1970s American cinema. It established wiseguys as the true American
anti-heroes and adventurers for our time, more seductively glamorous than cowboys or
spacemen; for decades afterwards the movie was a how-to behaviour manual for real-life
criminals.