Kubrick

Reviews & Features

Eyes Wide Shut

Eyes Wide Shut
14 Mar, 6:58 PM

Kubrick – Expecting Kubrick to do for the erotic thriller what he had already done for science fiction, the war film, the period piece, and the horror movie, spectators were instead greeted with a film of no determinate genre. Maddeningly deliberate in its pace, and adapted (sometimes verbatim) from a largely unknown 1926 Viennese novel, Eyes Wide Shut struck many as outdated in its sexual mores, questionable in the authenticity of its authorship, and even socially conservative in its message, its sexiest scene involving the rare sight of a married couple having sex.

Review by Leo Goldsmith  /  Comments (3)

Full Metal Jacket

Full Metal Jacket
13 Mar, 1:21 PM

Kubrick – Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam movie. Period. It’s no less idiosyncratic than his other conceptions of pure genre, and as such exhibits his sensibilities with perhaps greater transparency than his other films. This is to say that Full Metal Jacket is a menacing, incendiary picture, so calculated in its brutality that you’re more prone to endure its depictions of suffering than you are to enjoy it.

Review by Rumsey Taylor  /  Comments (2)

The Shining

The Shining
12 Mar, 11:56 AM

Kubrick – Stanley Kubrick’s fascination with the male ego continues with The Shining. We’ve witnessed Humbert Humbert’s masochistic, self-induced humiliation at the hands of a nymphet, General Jack D. Ripper’s quest to preserve male bodily fluids, and later, Dr. Bill Harford’s emasculation at his wife’s mere contemplation of an affair. Whatever one’s complaints may be about Kubrick in regards to his underwritten female characters, the men in Kubrick’s films are a wealth of insight into insecurity. In turn, Jack Torrance, armed with his “duty” of caring for the Overlook Hotel, joins the ranks as a terrifying, homicidal father.

Review by Jenny Jediny  /  Comments (4)

Barry Lyndon

Barry Lyndon
11 Mar, 11:50 AM

Kubrick – Barry is a rogue and will garner little sympathy from most viewers—the easiest viewpoint to take is that he has no one to blame but himself. But a deeper analysis reveals Kubrick’s true motives. Barry Lyndon contains subtle critiques of British manners, aristocracy and empire—the defining characteristics of 18th century England. Kubrick’s goal is to show the hollowness beneath the gilded veneer typically found in period dramas.

Review by David Carter  /  Comments (6)

A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange
10 Mar, 12:45 PM

Kubrick – There’s a sense that Kubrick lost control of his material because of his loss of the necessary critical distance. This is literally embodied in the many production stills you can find of Kubrick with his handheld camera sticking close to the rape and mayhem, appearing as one more droog in Alex’s gang. After establishing the narrative perspective as that of Alex, Kubrick’s treatment of his victims is the next inevitable step, whether he turns them into grotesques or implies that they’re to blame for the violence meted out to them. In the total collapse of Kubrick’s artistic project, there’s nothing left for him but to end the film with a piece of knee-jerk cynicism (“I was cured all right!”)—pathetic, gratuitous, and unworthy of the great film artist that Kubrick undoubtedly was.

Review by Ian Johnston  /  Comments (3)

2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey
09 Mar, 10:59 AM

Kubrick – The film’s bizarre structure, which has undoubtedly contributed to its reputation as an indecipherable cinematic puzzle, is a cycle in which seemingly irrelevant moments, images, shapes, and statements reappear, albeit slightly evolved, to create a sense of cinematic déjà vu. The bone used in the film’s first section to commit violence becomes a nuclear satellite circling Earth—one piece of technology becoming another, one weapon becoming another.

Review by Adam Balz  /  Comments (6)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
08 Mar, 11:57 AM

Kubrick – The bomber crew led by Slim Pickens’ Major Kong is constantly going through checklists and communicating via technical jargon, making sure they hit all the correct steps in bringing about an orderly end to the world. Like the cavernous War Room set that dwarfs the people in it, the picture that emerges is of a vast, endless bureaucracy coupled with a monstrous, deific technology that humans were smart enough to invent but powerless to control.

Review by Timothy Sun  /  Comments (3)

Lolita

Lolita
07 Mar, 9:34 AM

Kubrick – Lolita is famously considered unfilmable—but not for the scandalous reasons the tagline suggests. This is because the book is so dependent on language; almost all of the weight of the novel falls in the gap between Humbert’s written observations and the horrifying truth that seeps through his words. But if anybody could film Lolita, or could at least make the best effort, it would be Stanley Kubrick.

Review by Katherine Follett  /  Comments (2)

Spartacus

Spartacus
06 Mar, 11:58 AM

Kubrick – Despite the assured auteur status he gained in the sixties, Kubrick didn’t really share the scrappy protestant spirit of the Italian neorealists, the French New Wave, or their later American inheritors, all of whom rejected the historical epic out of hand as obsolete or irrelevant. Kubrick wanted not to abandon but to renovate the epic, to hold on to the grandeur and sweep of the big studio picture without retaining its outworn conventions. Spartacus, then, is where Kubrick cuts ties with the documentary tradition that had informed his early work, and starts learning to craft his own kind of spectacle.

Review by Evan Kindley  /  Comments (2)

Paths of Glory

Paths of Glory
05 Mar, 11:59 AM

Kubrick – There are nascent proclivities here, but none is more pervasive, or upsetting, than the thematic strand connecting Paths of Glory to Dr. Strangelove—futility in the face of cold-blooded savagery. Looking at the iniquities of war, with its bloodsoaked barracks and Kafkaesque bureaucracies, there seem to be only two reasonable responses: one can either scream in horror or laugh in disbelief.

Review by Sam Wasson  /  Comments (4)

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