Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

The Man Who Would Be King
(John Huston, 1975)
Michael Caine and Sean Connery combine to superb effect in this Kipling adaptation; they
play two British adventurers heading through the Khyber Pass to points north in search of a
mythical kingdom to loot. Rendered with muscularity by he-man director Huston.
Man With a Movie Camera
(Dziga Vertov, 1929)
A film whose stated mission was to craft an "absolute language of cinema" - a mission it
pursued single-mindedly and largely accomplished. Its restless camerawork, rapid-fire editing
and brazen transparency are as revolutionary as its maker's politics.
The Man With the Golden Arm
(Otto Preminger, 1955)
New ground was broken by Preminger here, with edgy subject matter - heroin addiction - that
was released into cinemas without the approval of Hollywood's Production Code. It's also one
of Frank Sinatra's most worthwhile film performances - he plays a would-be drummer battling
the big H in a manner approximating realism. Saul Bass' pioneering title sequence is the
capper.
The Man With Two Brains
(Carl Reiner, 1983)
Steve Martin perfects his lovable schlub persona in this goofy homage to 1950s sci-fi. He's a
neurosurgeon married to ice queen Kathleen Turner, who contrives to refrain from marital
relations at every possible occasion. While taking what he hopes will be a romanticallyinspiring
trip to Vienna he falls for Sissy Spacek. She'd be the perfect woman for him, if only
she wasn't a disembodied brain in a jar...
The Manchurian Candidate
(John Frankenheimer, 1962)
Brainwashed veterans of the Korean war are mere puppets on strings for the political
conspiracy that drives this peerless psychological thriller. With endless layers of sinister
intrigue, the movie plays mind games with its characters and audience alike - it's a uniquely
unnerving experience, as astonishing as it was 45 years ago.
Marat/Sade
(Peter Brook, 1967)
Peter Handke's intricate, complex play, which Brook had already produced on stage to
considerable acclaim, posits the Marquis de Sade guiding a performance by the inmates of a
19th-century lunatic asylum. Brook used most of the original RSC actors in their original roles,
and injects a suitable dose of cinematic energy; the result is far more than simply a filmed
play.
Marathon Man
(John Schlesinger, 1976)
After his government agent brother Roy Scheider is killed by Nazi war criminal Laurence
Olivier, history student Dustin Hoffman finds himself sucked into an international conspiracy
featuring missing diamonds, trust-no-one paranoia and intense toothache. A breathless,
tautly-paced thriller with a terrifying torture centerpiece that did for dentists what Jaws did for
beaches.
The Marriage of Maria Braun
(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1978)
There's a Sirkian lustre to this story of Maria (Hanna Schygulla), who marries Hermann (Klaus
Lowitsch) as the bombs rain down in wartime Germany, then in his absence builds a life as
another man's mistress. It's the travails of postwar Germany, writ small and bitterly personal,
in one of the most accessible of Fassbinder's provocative tales.