Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Monumentally enjoyable Vegas caper, based on the Rat Pack movie of the same name.
Director Soderbergh basks in kitsch inconsequentiality, flipping out high-stakes action
sequences, urbane camaraderie and spring-loaded romantic exchanges like poker chips.
Brad Pitt's sunkissed Rusty Ryan seems particularly at home.
Odd Man Out
(Carol Reed, 1947)
Reed's imaginary Belfast in Odd Man Out is as phantasmagoric and filled with menace and
edgy comedy as John Ford's Dublin in The Informer. James Mason's tragic, wounded IRA
man must make it across the night-time city before the RUC closes in on him and his gang. Of
special note: a psychedelic hallucination in beer bubbles.
Of Freaks and Men
(Aleksei Balabanov, 1998)
An elegantly salacious Russian portrait of 20th century decadence that draws uncomfortable
connections between pornography, class barriers, voyeurism and cinema itself. It's set in
sepia-tinted turn-of-the-century St Petersburg, where a corrupt manufacturer of erotica
infiltrates the households of the nobility, accumulating a strange coterie along the way.
Office Space
(Mike Judge, 1999)
Worker drones fighting stapler wars years before The Office. Ron Livingston's efforts to do as
little as possible from the confines of his cubicle inadvertently find him targeted for promotion
by the powers-that-be in this spot-on workplace satire from the Beavis and Butthead creator.
With Jennifer Aniston's McJob waitress as a suitably downbeat love interest.
Oldboy
(Park Chan-wook, 2003)
After 15 years of imprisonment in a dank room, a man bent on retribution swears to hunt
down his assailants in Chan-wook's queasy shocker. It's a gonzo adventure in grievous bodily
harm (crimes against teeth and tongue; a virtuoso hammer fight) and a Greek tragedy that
erupts with the madness of vengeance.
Oliver Twist
(David Lean, 1948)
Despite Polanski's recent version, this is still the best screen Oliver, and perhaps the best
Dickens of all. Wonderful larger-than-life characters lurking and chirping in a grimy workhouse
London: John Howard Davies' angelic, plummy Oliver; Robert Newton's black-hearted Sikes;
and Alec Guinness's comic-caricature Fagin.
Los Olvidados
(Luis Bunuel, 1950)
Bunuel, in Mexican exile from Francoist Spain, had his first postwar international success
since the early Dali collaborations with this playful upending of the moral certainties of the
Italian neorealist boom. His protagonists are slum children of Mexico City, deserving of our
pity, yet never earning it thanks to their frequent acts of guilt-free brutality.
Olympia
(Leni Riefenstahl, 1938)
In her summing-up of the 1936 Berlin Olympiad, Leni Riefensthal created the grammar for
modern sports coverage: close-ups, low-angle shots, multiple cameras - she did it all first.
When you watch the utterly lumpen official film of the 1948 London Olympics, you realise how
brilliant she was. It is just a pity that her paymaster was Hitler.
The Omen
(Richard Donner, 1976)
Coming across like an action-oriented version of The Exorcist, this delivers solid thrills and
standout set-piece deaths - with still the greatest decapitation scene in movie history. A slick