Kubrick Season
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Beginning with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a pattern set in. Anticipation for a new film by Stanley Kubrick would build, sometimes for years and often accompanied by flurries of rumors and supposedly true but impossible-to-prove tales from the set. And then, when the film finally arrived, it would be met with stunned bafflement.
Take The Shining (1980). In the long run-up to its release, an assumption took hold that, with his adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel, Kubrick set out to make the scariest movie of all time. But the Chicago Tribune’s Gene Siskel spoke for many reviewers that summer when he called The Shining “a crashing disappointment.” Others, such as the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, remained respectfully ambivalent.
Richard T. Jameson, writing for Film Comment, was one of the earliest critics to argue the case for the defense. “The Shining is a horror movie only in the sense that all Kubrick’s mature work has been horror movies,” wrote Jameson, “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.’ The Stephen King origins and haunted-house conventions notwithstanding, the director is so little interested in the genre for its own sake that he hasn’t even systematically subverted it so much as displaced it with a genre all its own. And why should this come as a surprise? Who bothers to characterize Dr. Strangelove [1964] as ‘an antiwar film,’ or sees merit in rating 2001: A Space Odyssey as ‘an outer-space pic,’ or finds particular utility in considering Barry Lyndon [1975] as a ‘costume picture’? The Shining is ‘A Stanley Kubrick Film,’ and as such it makes impeccable—if also horrific—sense.”
Kubrick shaved around half an hour off the 144-minute run time before The Shining hit European screens a few months later. On Sunday, both versions opened Kubrick, a comprehensive retrospective running on weekends at the Museum of the Moving Image in New York through December 27. The occasion is the release of our new box set The Complete Kubrick, which gathers all thirteen features—including both versions of The Shining—and three shorts, all restored in 4K, as well as more than two dozen hours of interviews and documentaries.
Not only are we supporting the MoMI series, we’ve also partnered with TCM to present Stanley, the new season of The Plot Thickens, the outstanding podcast hosted by Ben Mankiewicz. Over eleven episodes, Mankiewicz and his team spin the engaging narrative of the Bronx-born kid who, with a confidence that stopped just short of outright arrogance, parlayed a gig as a photographer for Look magazine into one of the most influential careers in cinema.
Last week it was announced that two more episodes have been added to the season, one featuring the full 1972 interview with Kubrick conducted by Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis and the other a recording of a recent Kubrick panel that Mankiewicz hosted in Los Angeles. All this adds up to a lot, so what follows here is less a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre than a few suggestions for supplemental reading with an emphasis on the earlier, perhaps lesser-known films.
We begin, of course, with the essay included in the box set. “How to define Kubrickian?” asks Nathaniel Rich. “If you blur your eyes to the varied settings and genres and periods, a central conceit emerges. The critic James Naremore describes it as ‘the story of how a carefully constructed plan fails.’ Biographer David Mikics: ‘His movies are about mastery that fails. Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents.’ Writer Geoffrey O’Brien characterizes it as ‘the obsessiveness of the human attempt to control the future—one’s own or the world’s—and the complicated ways in which that attempt fails.’ The films begin with vanity and end in failure, failure, failure.”
Kubrick considered his first feature a failure, dismissing Fear and Desire (1952) as “a bumbling amateur film exercise.” He was only twenty-four when he shot the story of four soldiers stranded behind enemy lines during a war between two unidentified countries. By the early 1990s, the film was out of copyright and in the public domain, and Kubrick did what he could to discourage its inevitable revival.
“Watching Fear and Desire with its director’s half-century of subsequent work in mind,” writes Christian Lorentzen for Metrograph’s Journal, “we see the seeds of many of his recurring themes and modes. There is the tension between officers and their subordinates, which he took to further extremes in Paths of Glory (1957) and Full Metal Jacket (1987); the sexual derangement that occurs in most of his films, but especially Lolita (1962), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut (1999); the warping group dynamics that spin out of control in The Killing [1956]; the sadism in the name of self-defense that Kubrick follows to absurd apocalyptic ends in Dr. Strangelove . . . A ‘bumbling amateur film exercise’ it may be, but Fear and Desire is also a blueprint for everything he went on to do, and that may be the real reason he wanted to keep it a secret.”
“If Fear and Desire anticipates the hemisphere of Kubrick’s work preoccupied by human devolution, violence, and corrosive destruction,” writes Roderick Heath, Killer’s Kiss (1955) “presents a hero who is beset by trials on an almost cosmic scale, and the questing protagonist, sometimes heroic, sometime not, but always driven in Kubrick’s films, comes fully to life here in its basic St. George and the Dragon tale of burnt-out boxer Davey, who falls for his neighbor Gloria, but has to win her from mid-level gangster Vincent.”
The story is “plainly an assemblage of elements Kubrick obviously enjoyed in several contemporary noir films,” adds Heath, but Killer’s Kiss “often feels less a genre pastiche than a rough draft for the New York indie film scene, which would explode within a decade, with aspects of cinéma vérité realism and improvisatory zeal: Cassavetes, Scorsese, Lumet, and De Palma are lurking in its genome.”
The Killing, a noir about an intricately planned heist gone wrong, is “arguably Kubrick’s most perfectly conceived and executed film,” suggests Jonathan Rosenbaum, who added in the Chicago Reader that Orson Welles “was so taken with this film that after seeing it he declared Kubrick could do no wrong.” For Pauline Kael, The Killing was “the real beginning of his career.” In 2011, Chuck Stephens put together an entertaining guide to the cast headed up by Sterling Hayden and including Coleen Gray, Timothy Carey, Elisha Cook Jr., and Marie Windsor.
“As a first expression of the ironic distancing of genre formulas maintained throughout his career,” wrote Haden Guest that same year, “The Killing also reveals Kubrick’s status as a key transitional figure between Old and New Hollywood. On one level, Kubrick’s bold reworking of studio-era genre traditions points toward their later rediscovery by such 1970s New Hollywood directors as Bogdanovich, Coppola, and Scorsese. Yet the extraordinarily diagrammatic shape that Kubrick gives to his reinventions displays an obsessive concern with systems and control that directly links his films to those of two emblematic artists of the studio era—Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, directors whose famously meticulous command over their films’ production also shaped their recurrent themes of fatalistic dark forces controlling both the lives and destinies of their characters and the narratives themselves. Significantly, for all three filmmakers, this ideal of total control—the notion of the director as master of the universe of his films—was also described as a form of madness, with so many of their films converging around stories of radically unstable characters who are either insane or trapped in worlds that systematically fold in on themselves.”
“Paths of Glory is a film for our time and, I think, for every time since the Industrial Revolution,” said David Simon, the creator of The Wire, in 2018. “It is about that point in which human beings become worth less, not more.” Set in the trenches of the First World War, the film begins with an order passed down to a French Colonel (Kirk Douglas) to lead his men into a hopeless drive to take “the Anthill,” a well-defended German stronghold. As punishment for the failure of the mission, three privates are selected, practically at random, to be court-martialed and ultimately executed.
James Naremore has written that Paths of Glory is “strongly marked by what came to be known as Kubrick’s style and favored themes: a mesmerizing deployment of wide-angle tracking shots and long takes, an ability to make a realistic world seem strange, an interest in the grotesque, and a fascination with the underlying irrationality of supposedly rational planning.” The film “depicts the conflict in all its cruel, almost laughably absurd logic . . . No wonder Luis Buñuel was among its passionate admirers.”
Kubrick and his good friend and producer James B. Harris were setting up an adaptation of Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita when Kirk Douglas called up Kubrick and asked him to take over the direction of Spartacus (1960), a sword-and-sandal epic, from Anthony Mann. Douglas, who was producing, would pay him $150,000, and Kubrick, who had made next to nothing from Paths of Glory and had recently married Christiane Harlan and adopted her daughter, could use the money. Plus, he’d get to work with Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, and Peter Ustinov.
Besides becoming the highest-grossing film of 1960 as well as what “may be the best-paced and most slyly entertaining of all the decadent-ancient-Rome spectacular films,” as Pauline Kael wrote at the time, Spartacus was also instrumental in helping to put an end to the Hollywood blacklist. Douglas had hired—and insisted on giving credit to—blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. For Kubrick, though, the experience, as vividly chronicled in Episode 4 of Stanley, was anything but pleasant. Never again would he relinquish full control of a picture to a Hollywood studio.
“How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” That was the tagline on posters and in radio and TV ads. “A fair question, especially in 1962!” exclaims Jesse Hassenger in his annotated ranking of Kubrick’s features for GQ. And maybe especially especially in 2026 with the Epstein files still under lock and key. Written by Nabokov and revised by Kubrick and Harris, the screenplay bumps up the age of Lolita (Sue Lyon) from twelve to fourteen and tones down the beastliness of Humbert Humbert (James Mason).
“Kubrick brings out moments of dark comedy for his version of the story, promoting Quilty (Peter Sellers) to a bigger part (complete with Sellers-style disguise shtick) and turning some of Humbert’s early travails into a kind of sick farce,” writes Hassenger, who’s placed Lolita at #7 on his list. “Yet the movie doesn’t deny Lolita’s pain, either, and by allowing raw moments to jostle up against dark comedy, Kubrick finds in the material a kinship with several of the less constrained films that followed it.”
Dr. Strangelove was indeed less constrained. A genuinely funny pitch-black comedy about a global nuclear war triggered by a single man who’s gone wacko, the film features Sellers in three roles, George C. Scott as General Buck Turgidson, and Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper. “And though photographed in England by an expatriate who would never return,” writes David Bromwich, “it is very much an American masterpiece, brimful of American types and stereotypes, American madness and ingenuity, every species of American idiolect, from regional slang to institutional euphemism. The rotating episodes in the Strategic Air Command base, the war room, and the cockpit of the rogue B-52 move forward in punctual succession, but individually the scenes have all the slowness of a bureaucratic process. The deep preoccupation of Dr. Strangelove is, in fact, not war itself but rather the political development of which modern war has been the largest symptom: the bureaucratization of terror.”
“By acting, arrogantly, as if nobody had ever made a really good science fiction film, Kubrick solves all the problems methodically but also pushes the genre into epic, mythic, spiritual terrain,” wrote David Cairns when he put 2001: A Space Odyssey on the ballot he cast in Sight and Sound’s 2022 Greatest Films of All Time critics’ poll. “Stately, bold, astonishingly beautiful. The great rationalist suddenly blasts us off into a psychedelic experience which doesn’t yield fully to reason.” 2001 landed at #6 in that poll; 480 directors voted it up to the #1 spot in their poll. In 1966, Jeremy Bernstein toured the set and played twenty-five games of chess with Kubrick for one of those marvelously long New Yorker profiles.
“Kubrick’s move from his 1968 space epic to A Clockwork Orange three years later echoed the counterculture’s downward path to darkness,” writes David Mikics for Tablet. “The higher consciousness promised by the gurus of acid gave way to a Manson and Altamont–induced savage pessimism about human nature. Something in the air of the mid-’60s was spurring the young toward a higher plane of existence, Kubrick sensed. Perhaps man was not a finished creature but, as Nietzsche prophesied, a mere beginning—we could become as gods. 2001 embodies this lofty hope for posthuman bliss, tinged with fear that newly deified humans might have a malevolent side. A few years after the marvelous Star Child of 2001, Kubrick gives us a dark god, a teenage criminal free from all moral restraint, whose charisma is purely brutal.”
By this point, Kubrick had “assumed the figure of a futurologist, at least for his most ardent devotees,” writes Geoffrey O’Brien. “The four-year wait preceding the release of Barry Lyndon in 1975—no one could know then that such intervals would grow ever longer—allowed ample time to speculate about the fact that he was venturing not deeper into the future but into the past. Kubrick being Kubrick, even the prospect of a historical film took on a science-fiction aura, as if we were now to be taken by time machine into the eighteenth century, much like the astronaut at the end of 2001 who found himself an old man dying in a Louis XVI bedroom somewhere beyond the outer rim of ordinary space-time.”
The adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1844 novel tracks the rise and fall of an Irish nobody through the Seven Years’ War, a stint as a professional gambler, a brush with the aristocracy (when he marries up), the loss of his beloved son, a tumble into alcoholism, and a debilitating duel. Writing for Notebook, Greg Gerke points out that Kubrick lifted a passage that appears early in the novel to use as an epilogue:
It was in the reign of George III
That the aforesaid personages lived and quarreled:
Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor
They are all equal now
“The epilogue speaks egalitarianly to me,” writes Gerke, “but it is in the spirit of many of [Kubrick’s] endings—we’re all fucked but we’re all in this together—especially The Killing, Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, Full Metal Jacket, and Eyes Wide Shut. His endings are cosmic, as if he were a seer stationed in outer space, peeking in on what makes us human and why we try and so often fail to be satisfied.”
Most critics initially disappointed by The Shining eventually came around. Homages are everywhere, from The Simpsons to a nine-minute sequence in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018). Senses of Cinema dedicated a full dossier to the film in 2020, and three years later, director Lee Unkrich (Toy Story 3, Coco) edited a handsome volume, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and now he has recorded an audio commentary for our new release.
In his 2012 documentary Room 237, Rodney Ascher interviews a range of devoted viewers who are convinced, as Manohla Dargis wrote in the New York Times, “that Kubrick did more than make a feverishly entertaining film about a family falling apart in an isolated hotel called the Overlook. He also embedded amazing messages in The Shining, cunningly weaving secrets and signs into the film’s very fabric, leaving clues about the Holocaust in elevators and messages about the Apollo 11 Moon landing in a sweater. In books, blogs, and now this movie, these fans carry forth the godhead’s gnostic communiqués.”
“Although initially received with bewilderment”—here we go again!—“Full Metal Jacket (1987) now stands among the key works in Stanley Kubrick’s exploration of identity and its problematic nature,” wrote Brad Stevens for Senses of Cinema in 2002. Matthew Modine stars as Private Joker, and the film follows him from his brutally intense basic training to hellish combat in Vietnam.
“If Kubrick’s films are about the workings of a mechanism,” wrote Stevens, “they lead inexorably to climaxes in which the intended end product—an individual converted into a tool in the service of some greater power—finally emerges: 2001’s Star Child, A Clockwork Orange’s ‘reformed’ Alex, his violence now to be used on behalf of an oppressive state, The Shining’s Jack Torrance, revealed as having always been a pawn of the Overlook Hotel’s ‘ghosts,’ and Full Metal Jacket’s Private Joker, whose sensitivity will be precisely what enables him to complete his training and become a killer. Although they may superficially imply a tentative hope, Joker’s final words—‘I am alive, and I am not afraid’—suggest the closing of a trap, the precise equivalent of A Clockwork Orange’s ‘I was cured all right.’”
Kubrick was applying the final touches to Eyes Wide Shut (1999) when he passed away. For most of his working life, he’d dreamed of doing something with Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle, first published in 1926, and working with writer Frederic Raphael, he transposed the story from fin de siècle Vienna to a 1990s New York reconstructed in London’s Pinewood Studios. The shoot with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman began in the fall of 1996 and wrapped in the summer of 1998.
Megan Abbott notes that “while there is a plot—and even a conspiracy—in Eyes Wide Shut, its story beats are hardly traditional. Instead, the narrative is structured more like a Russian nesting doll of dreams and fantasies, anxieties and humiliations, the fever dream of a husband whose marriage is nearly undone by a single expression of his wife’s unsanctioned lust. Indeed, it is in this exploration of the folly of male hubris that we can see the deepest connection to Kubrick’s prior films.”
“Why does Kubrick’s work continue to fascinate, thrill, and move us?” asked Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri when he rolled out his ranking of the thirteen features (and placed Barry Lyndon at #1). “For starters, his mastery of style was never overtly showy or arty or cute: His films draw us in immediately on both a narrative and formal level (they look and sound amazing), which then allows them to gradually reveal their ideas to us. And his great themes are eternal ones. Kubrick made movies about the inevitable failure of humans’ most precise plans; about how our paths to success were often also our paths to ruin; about how the things we sought to control eventually controlled us; and, of course, about the unfeeling carelessness of the powerful toward those beneath them. The reason we’ll never lose interest in his work is because we’re still living in his world.”
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