Film Comment

THE PLUCK OF ‘BARRY LYNDON’ – REVIEW BY JONATHAN ROSENBAUM

09/05/2018

So Barry Lyndon is a failure. So what? How many “successes” have you seen lately that are half as interesting or accomplished, that are worth even ten minutes of thought after leaving them? By my own rough count, a smug little piece of engineering like A Clockwork Orange was worth about five. I’m reminded of what Jonas Mekas wrote about Zazie several years ago: “The fact that the film is a failure means nothing. Didn’t God create a failure, too?”

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

STANLEY KUBRICK’S LAST FILM – BY AMY TAUBIN [FILM COMMENT]

31/12/2017

To be blunt about it, it’s impossible at this moment to separate thoughts and feelings about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut from the fact of his death. Or to put it another way, Kubrick’s death is the closure that his final film, for better or worse, resists to the last.

EYES WIDE SHUT: GHOST SONATA – By Richard T. Jameson [Film Comment]

30/12/2017

How are we supposed to watch Eyes Wide Shut? Really, how are we supposed to watch any Stanley Kubrick movie? Apprehension of so many of them has shifted between initial reviewing and years of re-viewing, of reconsideration from the vantage of a culture changed, often as not, by the films themselves.

The Shining (1980) - Twins bloodbath

KUBRICK’S SHINING – REVIEW BY RICHARD T. JAMESON [FILM COMMENT]

23/03/2017

The Shining is a horror movie only in the sense that all Kubrick’s mature work has been horror movies—films that constitute a Swiftian vision of inscrutable cosmic order, and of “the most pernicious race of little vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”

Tracy Reed and George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove

Sex an Dr. Strangelove

28/02/2017

This study will point out how Dr. Strangelove is a sex allegory: from foreplay to explosion in the mechanized world.