Ace in the Hole - MatthewHunt

Baye's husband, back home after years at war. The richness of the film lies not just in the
hero's quest to establish his identity but in its painstaking depiction of medieval rural life.
Ride the High Country
(Sam Peckinpah, 1962)
Peckinpah's marvellous, melancholic western incorporates the themes of The Wild Bunch -
the end of the old west, friendship and betrayal - but is more emotionally engaging, thanks to
leathery veterans Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott who play friends on opposite sides of the
law, reunited by a sack of money and the gallant urge to rescue a young bride.
Riff Raff
(Ken Loach, 1990)
Loach's treatment of working class and oppressed lives is so sharp that when other films are
described "Ken Loach-style" it's never meant as a negative. This is one of his best, with
itinerant workers in London using humour and anger to deal with their plight. And it brought
Ricky Tomlinson to the fore.
Rififi
(Jules Dassin, 1955)
Spreading out a barely mentioned robbery from the pulp novel source into half an hour of high
tension without either dialogue or music was a risk only a blacklisted director could take. What
should have been the last word in such sequences is still regularly copied today. Such a
standout has eclipsed the film's many other fine attributes: the gloomy atmospherics and grim
code of low-level hoods.
The Right Stuff
(Philip Kaufman, 1983)
This adaptation of Tom Wolfe's swaggering book chuckles at the absurdities and inanities of
the Apollo space programme while maintaining starry-eyed wonder for the astronauts and
their forays into the wild blue yonder. A celebration of gung-ho Americana that has its cake
and eats it too.
Ringu
(Hideo Nakata, 1998)
A grainy avant-garde video is killing its viewers in Nakata's instant horror classic, which works
so well by withholding visual information and ever so gradually increasing its levels of expertly
calibrated dread. There's also a fiendish climax that matches David Cronenberg's
Videodrome for uncanny televisual terror.
Rio Bravo
(Howard Hawks, 1959)
Rather than make a western, let's do a picture about a few friends making a western. So
Dean Martin is the drunk trying to reform, Walter Brennan does his old-man jokes. Wayne is
the sheriff, watching Martin. And Angie Dickinson is the girl who ties the sheriff up in cross talk
and her black tights. It's Howard Hawks - who else?
Risky Business
(Paul Brickman, 1983)
Yes, it's an adolescent wish-fulfilment movie, but it's also one of the sharpest, smartest films
about teenhood out there, and an easy-to-swallow guide to 80s capitalism. Tom Cruise's
underwear dancing and escalating crises provide more than enough comedy, but it's also
darker and sexier than most grown-up movies of the era.
Rita Sue and Bob Too
(Alan Clarke, 1986)
Written off as a crude farce on its initial release, Alan Clarke's bawdy sex comedy has grown
in stature down the years. It's an angry, funny tale of illicit sex on the estates of Bradford, and