Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

came to America, and he shot On the Waterfront, Twelve Angry Men and Long Day's Journey
Into Night where the mist is like the river water in L'Atalante. The cinema has its tradition.
David Thomson
Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
(Zacharias Kunuk, 2001)
The first film to be shot in the Inuktitut language, native to the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle,
is based on an ancient yarn with the timeless excitements of fisticuffs, family rivalry, adultery
and murder. The digital images are breathtaking - never more so than during Atanarjuat's
naked dash across the blinding vista of ice and snow.
Atlantic City
(Louis Malle, 1980)
Would-be croupier Susan Sarandon and two-bit gangster Burt Lancaster forge a bond in the
eponymous New Jersey burg amid betrayals, corruption, and Lancaster's delusions of
grandeur. Sarandon bathing herself with lemons is the iconic image of Louis Malle's sweetand-sour
portrait of a gambling town poised on a threshold between decay and renewal.
Au Hasard Balthasar
(Robert Bresson, 1966)
It's an ass's life. Jean-Luc Godard certainly thought so, saying of Bresson's film about a longsuffering
donkey, "everyone who sees this film will be absolutely astonished because the film
is really like the world in an hour and a half." We hear hardly a bray of complaint from
Balthasar as he is mistreated by owner after owner but we learn plenty about human
behaviour.
Au Revoir les Enfants
(Louis Malle, 1987)
A tender, compelling tear-jerker about a Jewish boy hidden from the Nazis in a Catholic
French boarding school during the second world war. Beautifully played by first-time young
actors, Malle's semi-autobiographical tale interwines friendship and secrets with the grim
reality of betrayal and lost innocence.
Audition
(Takashi Miike, 1999)
The kinkiest, creepiest, most pungently sexual horror film in recent memory: as macabre as a
jewel-inlaid dagger or antique instrument of torture. Director Takashi Miike has devised a
modern-day Jacobean revenge nightmare, which manages to make its delirium seem an
integral and plausible extension of the ordinariness and sadness that prefigure it. Ryo
Ishibashi plays Aoyama, a world-weary player in the Japanese film business. Having been
urged to renew his acquaintance with love by his son, Aoyama tries an ingenious scheme: he
holds open auditions for a film, but with a secret agenda; by auditioning for a non-existent
subordinate role, Aoyama can then casually approach the one he likes best for a date. But it
isn't long before we sense something wrong with Asami, the tall, willowy beauty with whom
Aoyama falls head over heels in love. She reveals herself as a terrifying avenger, visiting on
Aoyama the pain and death that he senses in the audition process, not merely as a
punishment for the male sexual triumphalism inherent in Japanese society, but a gratification
of his dark masochism of the spirit. And it really is pretty scary stuff. In the final scene - made
even more unspeakable by its semi-hallucinatory quality - Miike takes his stomach-turningly
dark playfulness, and marries it to the gruesomeness of a Clive Barker or the Stephen King of
Misery. An intricate torture garden of a film: a lurid nightmare in which the power relations
between women and men are acted out in the most barbarously extreme way.
Peter Bradshaw