9 Groundbreaking Movies. 10 Discs. One Visionary Moviemaker.
SPARTACUS (1960) The genre-defining epic tale of a bold gladiator
(Kirk Douglas) who leads a triumphant Roman slave revolt.
LOLITA (1962) Academic Humbert Humbert (James Mason) is obsessed
with a blithe teen (Sue Lyon) in a dark comedy from Vladimir
Nabokov’s novel.
DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) “Accidental” nuclear apocalypse, anyone?
Peter Sellers heads the cast of one of the most blazingly
hilarious movies of all time.
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) “The most awesome, beautiful and
mentally stimulating science-fiction film of all time” (Danny
Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic).
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: 40th Anniversary Edition (2-Discs) (1971)
Future world neo-punk Malcolm McDowell becomes the guinea pig for
a government cure of his tendency toward “the old
ultraviolence.”
BARRY LYNDON (1975) The visually spellbinding tale of an
18th-century Irish rogue’s (Ryan O’Neal) climb to wealth and
privilege.
THE SHINING (1980) In a macabre masterpiece adapted from Stephen
King’s novel, Jack Nicholson falls prey to forces haunting a
snowbound ain resort.
FULL METAL JACKET (1987) Marine recruits endure basic training
under a leather-lunged D.I., then plunge into the hell of
Vietnam.
EYES WIDE SHUT (1999) A wife’s admission of unfulfilled longing
plunges a Manhattan doctor into a bizarre erotic odyssey. Tom
Cruise and Nicole Kidman star.
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SPARTACUS: Stanley Kubrick was only 31 years old when Kirk
Douglas (star of Kubrick's classic Paths of Glory) recruited the
young director to pilot this epic saga, in which the rebellious
slave Spartacus (played by Douglas) leads a freedom revolt
against the decadent Roman Empire. Kubrick would later disown the
film because it was not a personal project--he was merely a
director-for-hire--but Spartacus remains one of the best of
Hollywood's grand historical epics. With an intelligent
screenplay by then-blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (from a novel
by Howard Fast), its message of moral integrity and courageous
conviction is still quite powerful, and the all-star cast
(including Charles Laughton in full toga) is full of entertaining
surprises. Fully restored in 1991 to include scenes deleted from
the original 1960 release, the full-length Spartacus is a
grand-scale cinematic marvel, offering some of the most awesome
battles ever filmed and a central performance by Douglas that's
as sensitively emotional as it is intensely heroic. Jean Simmons
plays the slave woman who becomes Spartacus's wife, and Peter
Ustinov steals the show with his frequently hilarious,
O-winning performance as a slave trader who shamelessly
curries favor with his Roman superiors. The restored version also
includes a formerly deleted bathhouse scene in which Laurence
Olivier plays a bisexual Roman senator (with restored dialogue
dubbed by Anthony Hopkins) who gets hot and bothered over a slave
servant played by Tony Curtis. These and other restored scenes
expand the film to just over three hours in length. Despite some
forgivable lulls, this is a rousing and substantial drama that
grabs and holds your attention. Breaking tradition with
sophisticated themes and a downbeat (yet eminently noble)
conclusion, Spartacus is a thinking person's epic, rising above
mere spectacle with a story as impressive as its widescreen
action and O-winning sets. --Jeff Shannon
LOLITA: When director Stanley Kubrick released his film
adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel about a
hopelessly pathetic middle-aged professor's sexual obsession with
his 12-year-old stepdaughter, the ads read, "How did they ever
make a film of Lolita?" The answer is "they" didn't. As he did
with his "adaptations" of Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, and,
especially, The Shining, Kubrick used the source material and,
simply put, made another Stanley Kubrick movie--even though
Nabokov himself wrote the screenplay. The chilly director
nullifies Humbert Humbert's (James Mason's) overwhelming passion
and desire, and instead transforms the story, like many of his
films, into that of a man trapped and ruined by social codes and
by his own obsessions. Kubrick doesn't play this as tragedy,
however, but rather as both a black-as-coffee screwball comedy
and a meandering, episodic road movie. The early scenes between
Humbert, Lolita (a too-old but suitably teasing Lyons) and her
loud, garish mother (Shelley Winters in one of her funniest
performances) play like a wonderful farce. When Humbert finally
fulfills his desires and captures Lolita, the pair hit the road
and Kubrick drags in Peter Sellers. As the pedophilic writer
Clare Quilty--Humbert's playful doppelgänger and biggest
threat--Sellers dons a series of disguises with plans of stealing
Lolita away from her captor. It's here more than anywhere that
Kubrick comes closest to the novel. He extends Nabokov's idea of
the games and puzzles played between reader and writer, Quilty
and Humbert, Lolita and Humbert, etc., to those between filmmaker
and audience: the road eventually goes nowhere and Humbert's
reality is exposed as mad delusion. Perhaps not a Kubrick
masterpiece, or the provocative film many wanted, Lolita still
remains playfully fascinating and one of Kubrick's strongest,
funniest character studies. --Dave McCoy DR.
STRANGELOVE: Arguably the greatest black comedy ever made,
Stanley Kubrick's cold war classic is the ultimate satire of the
nuclear age. Dr. Strangelove is a perfect spoof of political and
insanity, beginning when General Jack D. Ripper
(Sterling Hayden), a maniacal warrior obsessed with "the purity
of precious bodily fluids," s his singular campaign against
Communism by ordering a squadron of B-52 bombers to attack the
Soviet Union. The Soviets counter the threat with a so-called
"Doomsday Device," and the world hangs in the balance while the
U.S. president (Peter Sellers) engages in hilarious hot-line
negotiations with his Soviet counterpart. Sellers also plays a
British attaché and the mad bomb-maker Dr. Strangelove;
George C. Scott is outrageously frantic as General Buck
Turgidson, whose presidential advice consists mainly of panic and
statistics about "acceptable losses." With dialogue ("You can't
fight here! This is the war room!") and images (Slim Pickens's
character riding the bomb to oblivion) that have become a part of
our cultural vocabulary, Kubrick's film regularly appears on
critics' lists of the all-time best. --Jeff Shannon
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: When Stanley Kubrick recruited Arthur C.
Clarke to collaborate on "the proverbial intelligent science
fiction film," it's a safe bet neither the maverick auteur nor
the great science fiction writer knew they would virtually
redefine the parameters of the cinema experience. A daring
experiment in unconventional narrative inspired by Clarke's short
story "The Sentinel," 2001 is a visual tone poem (barely 40
minutes of dialogue in a 139-minute film) that charts a
phenomenal history of human evolution. From the dawn-of-man
discovery of crude but deadly tools in the film's opening
sequence to the journey of the spaceship Discovery and
metaphysical birth of the "star child" at film's end, Kubrick's
vision is meticulous and precise. In keeping with the director's
underlying theme of dehumanization by technology, the notorious,
seemingly omniscient computer HAL 9000 has more warmth and
personality than the human astronauts it supposedly is serving.
(The director also leaves the meaning of the black, rectangular
alien monoliths open for discussion.) This theme, in part, is
what makes 2001 a film like no other, though dated now that its
postmillennial space exploration has proven optimistic compared
to reality. Still, the film is timelessly provocative in its
pioneering exploration of inner- and outer-space consciousness.
With spectacular, painstakingly authentic special effects that
have stood the test of time, Kubrick's film is nothing less than
a cinematic milestone--puzzling, provocative, and perfect. --Jeff
Shannon
A CLOCKWORK ORANGE: 40th Anniversary Edition: Stanley Kubrick's
striking visual interpretation of Anthony Burgess's famous novel
is a masterpiece. Malcolm McDowell delivers a clever,
tongue-in-cheek performance as Alex, the leader of a quartet of
droogs, a vicious group of young hoodlums who spend their nights
stealing cars, fighting rival gangs, breaking into people's
homes, and raping women. While other directors would simply
exploit the violent elements of such a film without subtext,
Kubrick maintains Burgess's dark, satirical social commentary. We
watch Alex transform from a free-roaming miscreant into a convict
used in a government experiment that attempts to reform criminals
through an unorthodox new medical . The catch, of
course, is that this therapy may be nothing better than a quick
cure-all for a society plagued by rampant crime. A Clockwork
Orange works on many levels--visual, social, political, and
sexual--and is one of the few films that hold up under repeated
viewings. Kubrick not only presents colorfully arresting images,
he also stylizes the film by utilizing classical music (and Wendy
Carlos's electronic classical work) to underscore the violent
scenes, which even today are disturbing in their display of sheer
nihilism. Ironically, many fans of the film have missed that
point, sadly being entertained by its brutality rather than being
repulsed by it. --Bryan Reesman
BARRY LYNDON: In 1975 the world was at Stanley Kubrick's feet.
His films Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork
Orange, released in the previous dozen years, had provoked
rapture and consternation--not merely in the film community, but
in the culture at large. On the basis of that smashing hat trick,
Kubrick was almost certainly the most famous film director of his
generation, and absolutely the one most likely to rewire the
collective mind of the movie audience. And what did this radical,
at-least-20-years-ahead-of-his-time filmmaker give the world in
1975? A stately, three-hour costume drama based on an obscure
Thackeray novel from 1844. A picaresque story about an Irish lad
(Ryan O'Neal, then a major star) who climbs his way into high
society, Barry Lyndon bewildered some critics (Pauline Kael
called it "an ice-pack of a movie") and did only middling
business with patient audiences. The film was clearly a technical
advance, with its unique camerawork (incorporating the use of
prototype Zeiss lenses capable of filming by actual candlelight)
and sumptuous production design. But its hero is a distinctly
underwhelming, even unsympathetic fellow, and Kubrick does not
try to engage the audience's emotions in anything like the usual
way. Why, then, is Barry Lyndon a masterpiece? Because it
uncannily captures the shape and rhythm of a human life in a way
few other films have; because Kubrick's command of design and
landscape is never decorative but always apiece with his hero's
journey; and because every last detail counts. Even the film's
chilly style is thawed by the warm narration of the great English
actor Michael Hordern and the Irish songs of the Chieftains. Poor
Barry's life doesn't matter much in the end, yet the care Kubrick
brings to the telling of it is perhaps the director's most
compassionate gesture toward that most peculiar species of animal
called man. And the final, wry title card provides the perfect
Kubrickian sendoff--a sentiment that is even more poignant since
Kubrick's premature death. --Robert Horton
THE SHINING: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation
of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete
reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the
Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its
off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against
his wife and young son. Kubrick's movie is an existential Road
Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel's
labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces
inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the
blocked writer, who's settled in for a long winter's hibernation.
As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but
Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the
moment we meet him--all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin.
(Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria
in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's
fanatical demands for take after take after take.) The Shining is
terrifying--but not in the way fans of the novel might expect.
When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of
King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous
topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in
1980) was there--but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The
Shining gets under your skin and chills your s; it stays with
you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide...
--Jim Emerson
FULL METAL JACKET: Stanley Kubrick's 1987, penultimate film
seemed to a lot of people to be contrived and out of touch with
the '80s vogue for such intensely realistic portrayals of the
Vietnam War as Platoon and The Deer Hunter. Certainly, Kubrick
gave audiences plenty of reason to wonder why he made the film at
all: essentially a two-part drama that begins on a Parris Island
boot camp for rookie Marines and abruptly switches to Vietnam
(actually on sound stages and locations near London), Full
Metal Jacket comes across as a series of self-contained chapters
in a story whose logical and thematic development is oblique at
best. Then again, much the same was said about Kubrick's 2001: A
Space Odyssey, a masterwork both enthralled with and satiric
about the future's role in the unfinished business of human
evolution. In a way, Full Metal Jacket is the wholly grim
counterpart of 2001. While the latter is a truly 1960s film, both
wide-eyed and wary, about the intertwining of progress and
isolation (ending in our redemption, finally, by death), Full
Metal Jacket is a cynical, Reagan-era view of the 1960s' hunger
for experience and consciousness that fulfilled itself in
violence. Lee Ermey made film history as the Marine drill
instructor whose ritualized debasement of men in the name of
tribal uniformity creates its darkest angel in a murderous
half-wit (Vincent D'Onofrio). Matthew Modine gives a smart and
savvy performance as Private Joker, the clowning,
journalist who yearns to get away from the propaganda machine and
know firsthand the horrific revelation of the front line. In Full
Metal Jacket, depravity and fulfillment go hand in hand, and it's
no wonder Kubrick kept his steely distance from the material to
make the point. --Tom Keogh
EYES WIDE SHUT: It was inevitable that Stanley Kubrick's Eyes
Wide Shut would be the most misunderstood film of 1999. Kubrick
died four months prior to its release, and there was no end to
speculation how much he would have tinkered with the picture,
changed it, "fixed" it. We'll never know. But even without the
haunting enigma of the director's death--and its eerie
echo/anticipation in the scene when Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise)
visits the deathbed of one of his patients--Eyes Wide Shut would
have perplexed and polarized viewers and reviewers. After all,
virtually every movie of Kubrick's post-U.S. career had; only
1964's Dr. Strangelove opened to something approaching consensus.
Quite apart from the author's tinkering, Kubrick's movies
themselves always seemed to change--partly because they changed
us, changed the world and the ways we experienced and understood
it. And we may expect Eyes Wide Shut to do the same. Unlike
Kubrick himself, it has time. So consider, as we settle in to
live with this long, advisedly slow, mesmerizing film, how
challenging and ambiguous its narrative strategy is. The source
is an Arthur Schnitzler novella titled Traumnovelle (or "Dream
Story"), and it's a moot question how much of Eyes Wide Shut
itself is dream, from the blue shadows frosting the Harfords'
bedroom to the backstage replica of New York's Greenwich Village
that Kubrick built in England. Its major movement is an
imaginative night-journey (even the daylight parts of it) taken
by a man reeling from his wife's teasing confession of fantasized
infidelity, and toward the end there is a token gesture of the
couple waking to reality and, perhaps, a new, chastened maturity.
Yet on some level--visually, psychologically, logically--every
scene shimmers with unreality. Is everything in the movie a
dream? And if so, who is dreaming it at any given moment, and
why? Don't settle for easy answers. Kubrick's ultimate odyssey
beckons. And now the dream is yours. --Richard T. Jameson