Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

series of painterly close-ups. Its simplicity and procedural asceticism are inspired and
effectively turn the audience into congregants at an extraordinary spiritual event.
Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid
(Sam Peckinpah, 1973)
Peckinpah's Blood on The Tracks, his Exile on Main Street: a wistful, broken-hearted funeral
dirge for the 1960s, or for youth, or integrity, or honour among thieves. The film that finally
ruined him and the last masterpiece he found himself capable of making.
Pather Panchali
(Satyajit Ray, 1955)
Director Satyajit Ray was new to his craft when he made this gentle, beautifully photographed
classic about the young Bengali boy Apu preparing to leave his village - the first of the "Apu
trilogy". Ray created his own cinematic vernacular with this luminous black-and-white film and
a sui generis brand of serious movie-making.
Peeping Tom
(Michael Powell, 1960)
This was the shocker which ended Michael Powell's career, and it became known as the
"British Psycho", though Hitchcock's movie never had anything like its explicit squalor and
focus on the production of porn. Carl Boehm is the photographer and serial killer obsessed
with capturing the expression of fear on his victims' faces. It's a psycho-thriller classic that still
disturbs.
People On Sunday
(Curt Siodmak, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Fred Zinnemann,1930)
Shot with a borrowed camera over several weekends, this documentary-style study of
Berliners from the Weimar era enjoying their Sundays, lounging in the sun and flirting, pooled
some extraordinary young talent - all later to go to Hollywood. There is a playfulness and
eroticism here that hasn't dated at all.
Pépé le Moko
(Julien Duvivier, 1937)
A hard-boiled romantic noir, whose spirit was to resurface some years later in the Warner
Brothers classic Casablanca. Jean Gabin plays a tough-guy thief who has evaded the police's
grasp by hiding out in the labyrinthine maze of the Algiers Casbah. A fascinating thriller, giving
a psycho-analytic insight into Algeria's role in France's collective consciousness as the centre
of criminal uncontrollability.
Performance
(Donald Cammell, Nicolas Roeg, 1970)
Hedonist Cammell and crack cinematographer Roeg teamed up to brew this amazing
gangster flick maudit, a stylistic starburst fuelled by such a toxic rush of ideas it could only be
ushering in 1970s comedown. Mick Jagger's jaundiced hipster siphons off thug Edward Fox's
identity in a Notting Hill hideaway - peer through the fug of hash and solipsism, and there's a
gleaming vein of social comment.
La Petite Voleuse
(Claude Miller, 1988)
Truffaut's last script, filmed after his death by his former production manager Miller. The
central figure is a distaff version of the Antoine Doinel of The 400 Blows: a teenage girl whose
lapse into petty crime is more a result of a difficult upbringing than any innate nastiness.
Serious, frowning Charlotte Gainsbourg is faultless in the role.
The Philadelphia Story
(George Cukor, 1940)
Box-office poison at the time, Katharine Hepburn got Philip Barry to write this play for her -
and then Hepburn negotiated for the film: George Cukor to direct, and, in the end, Grant and