Rodney Ascher’s Room 237 provides free rein to five obsessive fans who air their personal interpretations of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). While other people’s obsessions can be fascinating, and conspiracy theories often provide narratives more satisfying than prosaic reality, sometimes, when overexposed, they can become exhausting and irritating. I approached Ascher’s film with a […]
When Stanley Kubrick’s movies were released on Blu-ray back in 2011, I decided it was time to watch them all again in chronological order. In part to remind myself of just why he’d been important to my sense of film for over forty years, and in part to see what patterns I could discern in […]
It was seven years after The Shining before Stanley Kubrick released his next film. Even given that Full Metal Jacket was two years in the making, that still leaves a long gap, perhaps indicating the difficulty he had in both finding the right subject and securing financing, even though the King adaptation had been reasonably […]
The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel, The Shining, when it was released in 1980, I lined up for an hour to get into the Colony Theatre on opening night. Just as my friend and I were reaching the door, an usher came out counting heads; she dropped her […]
My project of revisiting all of Stanley Kubrick’s movies in chronological order has, once again, been stalled for some time, although the delay in looking at Barry Lyndon again has nothing to do with the kind of reluctance I felt with Spartacus. Rather, it’s just been difficult to find a clear window of three-plus hours […]
Anthony Burgess wrote his short novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962 as a way of coming to terms with the rape of his first wife. It may seem odd then that the book takes the first person point of view of Alex, a 14-year-old boy, who commits numerous crimes, including rape and murder. In addition, […]
I first saw Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in St. John’s, Newfoundland, when I was 13. Like a lot of people back then, I responded to it as an “experience” rather than a narrative. I don’t think I even thought about what it might “mean”, I just got caught up in the imagery, the […]
By 1964, Stanley Kubrick had been honing his filmmaking skills for more than ten years in a series of increasingly ambitious projects, all of which were somewhat conventional in terms of form and content – film noir, historical epic, war film. Even Lolita, although the subject matter pushed accepted boundaries, is recognizable as melodrama. For […]
After the experience of directing Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick got as far away from Hollywood as he could. He moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life and made his eight subsequent features. Interestingly, the first two of those films were both set in the United States, as if despite making the […]
At the height of the Cold War official propaganda was aimed at lulling the population into accepting the idea of nuclear war as somehow normal and “manageable”, as depicted in the Central Office of Information short The Hole in the Ground (1962) which shows no-nonsense bureaucrats getting on with the job of “maintaining order” during an attack on Britain.