Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Last Days
(Gus Van Sant, 2005)
You could think of this fictionalised take on the end of Kurt Cobain's life as a nature
documentary, filmed through a thick, disorienting cloud of heroin and musique concréte. Here
time seems to expand, liquefy, and double back on itself, while protagonist Michael Pitt seems
to exist in another gravitational pull altogether.
Last Metro
(Francois Truffaut, 1980)
A Jewish theatre manager hides in the basement of his own theatre in Nazi-occupied France,
while his non-Jewish wife directs a play called Disappearance, working from her fugitive
husband's notes - and hires a handsome womaniser and resistance fighter in the lead role.
From this material, and with Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu as quasi-widow and
actor, Truffaut creates a resonant film about the political role of the artist, the sublimation of
sexuality in performance, and even the philosophical notions of absence and presence.
The Last Movie
(Dennis Hopper, 1971)
Certainly the last movie that Universal's newly formed Youth Division was prepared to accept
from Dennis Hopper. Painfully extruded from a Sargasso Sea of raw footage, Hopper's
meditation on a western being filmed in Peru isn't half as half-baked as its detractors claim,
and yields up surprising treasures and insights 36 years later.
The Last Picture Show
(Peter Bogdanovich, 1971)
A double nostalgia trip today, this masterful minor-key study of a dusty dead-end town looked
back to the decline of cinema in the 1950s, and heralded the arrival of the then "New
Hollywood" generation. Its young stars would become key figures of the movement (Jeff
Bridges, Cybill Shepherd, Ellen Burstyn), but this was arguably its high point.
Last Resort
(Pawel Pawlikowski, 2000)
In the story of a Russian mother and son forced to claim asylum in Britain, it soon becomes
apparent that freedom is really nothing more than a word. Red tape conspires to put their
lives on hold, while the off-season seaside setting presents an almost sarcastic array of
cheap pleasures.
The Last Seduction
(John Dahl, 1994)
Linda Fiorentino sinks her teeth so deeply into her role as an aggressively opportunistic and
manipulative femme fatale that it's inconceivable to think of anyone else in the role. The
people she targets are such easy marks she can hardly be blamed for exploiting them.
Last Tango in Paris
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972)
The auteur here is as much Brando as Bertolucci, in one of the rare instances when the
actor's inventiveness encountered a director capable of accomodating his volcanic
improvisations. Brando - beautiful here for the last time - truly left us no deeper, more
wounded or heartbreaking performance.
Last Year in Marienbad
(Alain Resnais, 1961)
At a rococo chateau, a man tries to convince a beautiful married woman that they met the
previous year and had arranged to meet again. Is he telling the truth? Something of a rite of
passage for European-cinema neophytes, Resnais' dreamlike film tantalises by posing an
elegant question that has no answer.