Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Part modern Robin Hood, part Pablo Escobar, Walken remains implacably, eerily still as
ultraviolence rages entertainingly, perhaps satirically, all around him.
Kiss Me Deadly
(Robert Aldrich, 1955)
The apotheosis of film noir, all insanely skewed angles and hellish chiaroscuro, inventive
brutality and leering sexual innuendo. KMD is Robert Aldrich at his aggressive, cynical,
ultraviolent finest, marrying the conventional gumshoe flick to the mortal considerations of
1955, principally the atom bomb, or as Mike Hammer calls it, "the big whatsit".
Kiss of the Spider Woman
(Hector Babenco, 1985)
Two-hander set in a cell in a never-named Latin American country, with flamboyant gay movie
lover William Hurt escaping dangerous realities by recounting scenes from his favourite pulp
movie to his political-prisoner cellmate, radical Raul Julia. Babenco's compelling adaptation of
Manuel Puig's novel zeroes in on issues of manhood and heroism, as well as making brilliant
use of a movie-within-a-movie structure.
Klute
(Alan J. Pakula, 1971)
An out-of-his-element Ohio cop and a NYC call-girl (Jane Fonda) comb New York for the man
who killed his best friend. A reverse-western in formal terms (like Coogan's Bluff with ice in its
veins), it offers a paranoid template for Pakula's 70s thrillers, and an unnervingly static
performance from Donald Sutherland.
Knife in the Water
(Roman Polanski, 1962)
The terse dynamism that would spill out in Polanski's later films is shown in its raw prime in
his feature debut, a claustrophobic three-way drama in which a middle-aged couple pick up a
hitchhiker and invite him to join them on their yacht. The male-ego psychodrama that follows
is a masterclass in tension, heightened by the wide-open waters that surround it on every
side.
Koyaanisqatsi
(Godfrey Reggio, 1982)
Hypnotic portrayal of collective life on Earth in the 20th century, building up from awe-inspiring
natural panoramas to the time-lapse insanity of urban life, set to an incantatory score by Philip
Glass. Are we a continuation of nature or some disastrous, cancerous offshoot? If we are
going down, then at least we produced art like this.
Kwaidan
(Masaki Kobayashi, 1964)
Japan's most expensive production when it was released in 1964, this portmanteau of four
supernatural tales adapted from ex-pat writer Lafcadio Hearn musters eerie strength.
Kobayashi intensifies everything by placing meticulously posed actors on expressionist sets -
a giant celestial eye rages in the background of one - giving these folktales a grand, mythic
resonance.
LA Confidential
(Curtis Hanson, 1997)
A brilliant feat of compression, neatly gutting, sanitising and arranging James Ellroy's
sprawling novel into a neo-noir showpiece. As in Chinatown, something is very rotten in the
city of Los Angeles: Russell Crowe's strongarm cop forms an unlikely bond with Guy Pearce's
uptight desk-jockey, and they bring home all of Ellroy's flashy cynicism.
The Lacemaker
(Claude Goretta, 1977)
Before her flair for the dark and the disturbing was disclosed, Isabelle Huppert played the