Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

The Killer
(John Woo, 1989)
This Hong Kong thriller set a new standard in cinematic gunplay, and claimed many
casualties in the process. The plot, concerning an honourable assassin (Chow Yun-fat), has
its slushy moments, but otherwise it's relentlessly action-packed, with Woo's much-imitated
kinetic camerawork and skilful choreography sustaining the excitement.
The Killers
(Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Siodmak's noir visions always harked back, more even than those of his fellow emigres, to
German expressionism's narrow palate of intensely expressive monochromes: a funeral
under black umbrellas, a payroll heist in a 90-second single take, a doomed young Burt
Lancaster - and Ava, perfect, perfidious Ava, in all her intoxicating ripeness.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(John Cassavetes, 1976)
Shapeless yet utterly compelling Cassavettes melodrama about a stripclub owner in hock to
the mob for gambling debts, this is the director's male counterpart to A Woman Under the
Influence's account of female disintegration, a chaotic discourse on masculine selfdestruction.
Ben Gazarra's finest hour.
The Killing
(Stanley Kubrick, 1956)
The movie that put Kubrick on the map, a geometrically precise, furiously detailed and
polished racetrack-robbery thriller that prefigures in miniature all his fatalistic themes. Fifty
years later, it still looks like it was made tomorrow. Killer line: Sterling Hayden's last words,
"Ah ... what's the difference?"
Kind Hearts and Coronets
(Robert Hamer, 1949)
Perhaps the most acidic of all the Ealing comedies, dispatching Dennis Price's embittered
bastard son on a mission to bump off the heirs to the D'Ascoyne family fortune. Meanwhile,
Alec Guinness pulls on a myriad of guises as the various victims, including - most memorably
- the imperious suffragette who "falls to earth in Berkeley Square".
King Kong
(Merian C Cooper, Ernest B Schroedsack, 1933)
Go to Skull Island. Face down the "natives". Survive the ordeal, if you can. And pray for
decency's sake that that Kong guy leaves a few clothes on Anne Darrow. This is what
innocent sensation was meant to be. Beauty and the Beast with an update - and the most
frightening monster is the film producer.
King Lear
(Grigori Kosintzev, 1969)
A thunderous Soviet adaptation of Shakespeare's politicised tragedy, with the USSR's Baltic
coast providing dramatic, beetling backdrops, and veteran Estonian actor Jüri Järvet creating
a Lear of unquenchable nobility of spirit.
The King of Comedy
(Martin Scorsese, 1983)
Robert De Niro is cruelly brilliant as aspiring comedian Rupert Pupkin, who goes to creepy
extremes to win a spot on a late-night talk show. It failed to find an audience on its release in
1983, but Scorsese's film is now regarded as a prescient commentary on celebrity worship.
King of New York
(Abel Ferrara, 1990)
An inscrutable Christopher Walken emerges from prison determined to rule the New York
drug trade, the better to start financing hospitals and relief programmes for the city's poor.