Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

metamorphosis into a plastic airhead owes a debt to Michael Lehmann's much darker
Heathers.
Mean Streets
(Martin Scorsese, 1973)
Scorsese's autobiographical breakthrough is a breathless trip through Little Italy, where the
streets are paved and policed by organised crime. The film asks an urgent and perhaps
impossible question: in a corrupt and brutal environment, how do you define a moral code and
stick to it?
Meet Me in St Louis
(Vincente Minnelli, 1944)
A warm-hearted, deeply nostalgic anthem to family values, with Minnelli directing wife-to-be
Judy Garland as one of the happy Smith brood of St Louis. There's panic when Dad (Leon
Ames) threatens to relocate to ugly New York, but songs such as Have Yourself a Merry Little
Christmas suggest they'll pull through. Probably the best rainy-Sunday movie ever.
Meet the Parents
(Jay Roach, 2000)
Snappy comedy that sees male nurse Ben Stiller trying to win over prospective father-in-law
Robert De Niro - an ex-CIA agent who still knows his way around a lie detector. De Niro
brings the full force of his unhinged screen persona to the role, the perfect straight man to
Stiller's slapstick underachiever.
Memento
(Christopher Nolan, 2000)
A thriller-as-jigsaw-puzzle that gives a clever spin to the revenge tragedy, with a hero (Guy
Pearce in his break-out role) whose actions are confined by a severely limited short-term
memory, and whose body is accordingly covered in cryptic "reminder" tattoos. You'd think it
would beat a Post-It note, but they spell nothing but confusion for the conflicted protagonist.
Memories of Murder
(Joon-Ho Bong, 2003)
It's not easy to make a film that's both gripping and hilarious, but this superb South Korean
thriller pulls it off. Reconstructing the hunt for a 1980s serial killer, it's a tragicomic catalogue
of police ineptitude but also a snapshot of the country at its most paranoid, braced for attack
from the North.
Memories of Underdevelopment
(Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)
When his family leaves Cuba for Miami, a blocked writer stays put, but feels displaced from
his rapidly changing society. A landmark of Cuban cinema, the film does double duty as an
empathic character study and a political allegory about the intelligentsia's detachment from
everyday life in post-revolutionary Cuba.
Men in Black
(Barry Sonnenfeld, 1997)
Shackling the Will Smith roadshow for one of 1997's flagship releases, Sonnenfeld managed
a minor subversive miracle for a blockbuster: bringing MiB in trim at just under 100 minutes.
The obligatory hardware scene, in which Smith's extra-terrestrial bail bondsman tries out "the
Mighty Cricket", a speck of a gun, sums up the film's style: small, with a very hefty kick.
Mephisto
(Istvan Szabo, 1981)
An actor sells his soul to the Nazi party while pretending to himself that it's all a necessary
performance - his most challenging role - in Szabo's Faustian tale. As suits a film about
acting, it centres on Klaus Maria Brandauer's multifaceted performance as a man without
morals, whose flaws none the less remain recognisably human.