Barry Lyndon is utterly the opposite of the loose, improvised movies which are so popular with many critics these days. Every detail of it is calculated; the film is as formal as a minuet.
Eyes Wide Shut is a catastrophe—in both the popular sense and the classical sense of the end of a tragedy. Everything in Kubrick that had been worming through his career, through his ego, and through his extraordinary talent swells and devours this last film.
Can the sentiment of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket be anything but mere attitude—death-enthralled chic?
Kubrick has, in one big jump, discovered new possibilities for the screen image. He took on a large challenge, and has met it commendably.
A Clockwork Orange is a characteristically frosty piece of film-making, shorn completely of sentiment, working through brilliant ironies and dazzling dramatic ideas that please us, provoke our laughter, galvanize our intellects, win our admiration—but never touch our hearts.
The Shining doesn’t scare. The only pang in it is that it’s another step in Kubrick’s descent.
The strength of 2001 is that it confronts our civilization with an alien one while preserving the mystery of their encounter. The black monolith appears both as a threat and as a sign of hope at three decisive moments in man’s evolution.
Now that its title has been changed from Bed of Fear (as it was called when I wrote about Stanley Kubrick’s last picture in Sight and Sound) to The Killing, one need really have no reservations at all. This shrewd, engrossing, complete-in-itself melodrama is the kind of film one had begun to think was no longer possible to make in Hollywood.
The young writer-director-photographer-editor of this unpromisingly titled film has a good deal of talent. He made Killer’s Kiss a year or so ago in New York—on location and in a small studio—and later sold it to United Artists for distribution. He has now directed his first Hollywood film, a melodrama called (also unpromisingly) Bed of Fear.
Lolita has everything it needed to be as brilliant and beautiful as the novel, except great direction. Vladimir Nabokov’s screenplay is a model of adaptation—resourceful, economical, light-bodied.
Kubrick’s films should be ‘read’ as opposed to ‘viewed’. Too often, the notion of film as something we view rather than read results in a great loss of riches that film by directors such as Kubrick have to offer.
While Kubrick and writers Calder Willingham and Jim Thompson have changed the focus and toned down some of his narrative’s brutality, Cobb yet remains the ultimate source of the film’s drama and of most of its ideas.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) remains Kubrick’s crowning, confounding achievement. Homeric sci-fi film, conceptual artwork, and dopeheads’ intergalactic joyride, 2001 pushed the envelope of film at a time when Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music ruled the box office.
By taking a book by an author who is at the center of the craze for the supernatural, and turning it into a refusal of and subtle comment on that loopy cultural phenomenon, Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level
Kubrick’s films have leaned toward a kind of reluctant misanthropy which reveals the capability for self-destruction as the linchpin of man’s existential predicament.
The most evocative aural and visual descriptions in Lolita are in the manner of classic Forties films noirs, with their oppressive rain-washed nightscapes and their desperate, driven men—seemingly decent people who have irreparably committed themselves to their dreams, passions, or obsessions, and are suddenly crimina
Although passed without cuts, Lolita was rated “X” by the British Board of Film Censors when released in 1962, meaning no one under 16 years of age was permitted to watch.
2001: Odissea nello spazio abbraccia un arco di oltre un milione d’anni, dall’alba dell’uomo al primo volo verso Giove. Kubrick ha avuto al fianco Arthur C. Clarke, un autore di fantascienza che è anche scienziato, e gli ha chiesto di guidarlo attraverso quelle che una felice formula editoriale ha definito «le meraviglie del possibile».
by Dwight Macdonald With this comédie noire Stanley Kubrick clinches his title—one I conceded him years ago—to Best of Show among our younger directors and
by Dwight Macdonald Lolita is a good movie which might have been much better. For the title role, Stanley Kubrick discovered a teen-age television actress