The Shining (1980)

UK / USA, 146 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Krzysztof Penderecki, Bela Bartok, Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
Editor: Ray Lovejoy
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone

Here's a platitude. Horror is a matter of personal taste—whether you like it, first, and then what works and doesn't. I like horror, but The Shining has never worked for me particularly. It's too long, too slow, too dependent on performances that are mannered or desperate, with a story full of ridiculous holes. Among other things, it is at war with its source novel. The images that jolted me are only good once (blood inexplicably pouring out of an elevator shaft) or derivative (the twin girls, too reminiscent of Diane Arbus, though underlining director and cowriter Stanley Kubrick's origins as a photographer). I've never been impressed with Jack Nicholson's cackling looney tunes turn here, even less with Kubrick's mistreatment of Shelley Duvall to provoke the raw (and, yes, convincing) anxiety that she brings.

Yet that said, those kinds of problems and many others are hallmarks of Kubrick's career, and in spite of them I keep returning to his movies. So I have kept returning to The Shining, hoping something I could hold on to would shake loose. I got an important clue from the strange and often annoying 2012 documentary, Room 237, which features interviews with people obsessed with The Shining and what they think it's "really"  and "obviously" about: the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, an apologia by Kubrick for his part in the moon landing hoax, so on so forth. Out of this mess came my elusive moment of clarity, such as it was.

Barry Lyndon (1975)

UK / USA, 184 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, William Makepeace Thackeray
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Franz Schubert, Antonio Vivaldi et al.
Editor: Tony Lawson
Cast: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Leon Vitali, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Murray Melvin, Andre Morell, Leonard Rossiter, Philip Stone, Michael Hordern, Frank Middlemass

It's the 21st century, and Barry Lyndon is a 20th-century movie written and directed by Stanley Kubrick based on a 19th-century novel by William Makepeace Thackeray about a man who lived in the 18th century. Kubrick's picture, a modest success at best on release, has become so well respected now it rounds off the top 50 of the list of the 1,000 greatest films of all time according to the fine folks at They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?, a list that is based on a wide-ranging survey of movie critic rankings. But what is Barry Lyndon—what is it really?

Browsing the Internet for some help with this question, I was surprised to find the range of opinion on what I have always taken as a relatively straightforward (and quite well done) version of the upholstered movie, the kind of exercise Merchant Ivory perfected with approximately A Room With a View and Howards End, which has been so routinely abused since the '90s. I have looked at Barry Lyndon a certain way—our hero, named in the title, is a bit of a naïve fool, and something of a knave, but mostly he is a common man with a few uncommon skills trying to make his way in a cruel world. Come to find, others focus very hard on the knavery, with a minority more persuaded by the naiveté—and there are other interpretations as well. What's more, they often seem to work.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

UK / USA, 136 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Anthony Burgess
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Ludwig van Beethoven
Editor: Bill Butler
Cast: Malcolm McDowell, Warren Clarke, James Marcus, Michael Tarn, Patrick Magee, Adrienne Corri, Michael Bates, Sheila Raynor, Philip Stone, Anthony Sharp, Carl Duering, Michael Gover, Aubrey Morris, David Prowse, Clive Francis

There's nothing subtle about A Clockwork Orange. Its famous violence is obvious and programmatic: assault, robbery, rape, murder, the usual. In fairness, the picture does a reasonably good job of anticipating how ongoing societal breakdowns play out. And the solutions to the violence, arguably the point of this near-future fantasy, are also obvious and programmatic (see title metaphor, which belongs to the author of the original novel, Anthony Burgess). In the end, in an example of classic Stanley Kubrick cynicism, it appears that attempting to solve problems only makes them worse, and in unimaginable ways. We are left to try to live with the consequences. I suspect all the heavy-handed, clonking points are as much as anything the reason why I loved it so much as a teen. I do appreciate better now the horrors of the violence in the first 15 minutes alone—"the old ultra-violence," as voiceover narrator and main dude Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) insists on calling it. But I also still appreciate the energy, concision, and choreography that went into those early scenes, especially the gang fight, which is a case of pure infectious dynamics. And the Beethoven soundtrack only propels it.

In fact, much like the case with some Woody Allen movies, I now experience A Clockwork Orange at least partly as formative and already internalized, operating in a kind of twilight haze of nostalgia. Some of the language formations—the moronic "well well well well well well well" of one of the thugs, the use of "appy polly loggies" as a sarcastic way to apologize, "eggiwegs" and such for food, and Alex's occasional elaborately Shakespearian turns of phrase, such as "what didst thou in thy mind have?"—I still use, and am often surprised on revisits to this movie to find them waiting for me there. A Clockwork Orange is less than convincing in its ideas, bogged down in outdated Cold War gestures such as a youth slang pervaded by Russian (that was Burgess more than director / screenwriter Kubrick), or just simply smug about its ability to shock. But some of its individual elements nonetheless remain outstanding—a hallmark of Kubrick films, as we can see better all the time.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

UK/USA, 159 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael, Arthur Schnitzler
Photography: Larry Smith
Music: Jocelyn Pook
Editor: Nigel Galt
Cast: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Julienne Davis, Rade Serbedzija, Vinessa Shaw, Todd Field, Sky du Mont, Marie Richardson, Leelee Sobiesko, Leon Vitali, Alan Cumming, Fay Masterson

A telling fact about Eyes Wide Shut: Ultimately it earned $55.7 million in the U.S. on its release in July 1999, four months after director Stanley Kubrick's death, but $31 million of that (or nearly 57%) came just in the first week of its release. A simple but transparent story of high expectations thwarted. One contingent had been excited to see the first Kubrick film in some 12 years, and the last ever, while others were excited about the "it couple" of the moment who star in it, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Still others knew it was supposed to be sexy and naughty. What little they otherwise had in common came to include reviling the movie. I took them at their word and, on that basis (and also Full Metal Jacket, his previous movie and weakest by far), decided to skip it.

When I finally sat down with a copy of it on DVD years later my expectations were as low as everyone else's had once been high. My primary concern was how I was going to get through the two and a half hours I knew it lasted. But two and a half hours later I was barely aware any time had passed, and I started it up again. It is that kind of movie for me. Even when it is at its most ridiculous—and it gets very ridiculous—it gives me shivers constantly, shivers of fear, pleasure, recognition, panged confusion. I consider it now as among Kubrick's best, one whose mystery just seems to open up wider and take me deeper every time.

A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001)

Artificial Intelligence: AI, USA, 146 minutes
Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Brian Aldiss, Ian Watson, Steven Spielberg
Photography: Janusz Kaminski
Music: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Cast: Haley Joel Osment, Frances O'Connor, Sam Robards, Jake Thomas, Jude Law, William Hurt, Brendan Gleeson, Robin Williams, Chris Rock, Al Jourgensen

An interesting project would be to go through A.I. and catalog all uses of the word "real"—and its counterpart, "artificial," which is in the title two ways. The boy-robot David (played brilliantly in an unsettling performance by Haley Joel Osment) is constantly reminded by others that he is "not real." When he is abandoned in the woods by Monica Swinton (played by Frances O'Connor), in one of the most wrenching scenes in a picture full of them, he shamelessly pleads and grovels, drawing on his understanding of the Pinocchio story to ask if he can come home again if he is a real boy. "That's just a story," Monica says. "But a story tells what happens," David responds. "Stories are not real," she says. "You're not real."

The story of this film is well known and fascinating, involving a collaboration that seemed unlikely at the time between Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg. Starting in 1984 they traded notes, design ideas, and suggestions back and forth, riffing on a Brian Aldiss story, "Supertoys Last All Summer Long." But as with so many movie projects it never came to be. After Kubrick's death Spielberg took it up again. The result is a formal collaboration that feels at once like both of them—and a little strange and disorienting at that, because directors with such distinctive visions so rarely collaborate. In the end it feels more like a Spielberg project (with some admixture of Gene Roddenberry's optimism in there as well), concerned with families and impossible love lost and found, and unafraid of the heartwarming gesture. But the ghost of Kubrick definitely hovers over it in its visual schematics, in the ways it so freely philosophizes and addresses its largest issues, and in its clinical precisions.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

UK, 95 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George
Photography: Gilbert Taylor
Music: Laurie Johnson
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Cast: Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Peter Bull, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, James Earl Jones, Tracy Reed

There are a number of facts about the historical context of Dr. Strangelove I hadn't understood well before looking into the picture a bit more deeply. The original premiere, for example, was scheduled for November 22, 1963, which obviously meant it had to be postponed for several weeks. On that same tip there was even a scene that contained the line, "Gentlemen! Our gallant young president has just been struck down in his prime!"—part of a pie-throwing scene that sounds altogether too silly and was cut for that reason. It was cut before the assassination of John Kennedy happened, but you see what I'm getting at here.

In many ways, Dr. Strangelove stepped in as an augur of public moods to come and it exists there still, a model to be aspired to. As black comedies go, it's fairly obvious: inept bureaucracies unable to identify and ward off their threats from within find themselves on the brink of planetary annihilation. In response, those who ostensibly have the power to take action act like schoolchildren. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? If Stanley Kubrick hadn't been the one to get to it first, someone else would have, and not long after. It's been a theme returned to again and again since. So it's good, I think, that it was Kubrick who got there first.

Lolita (1962)

UK/USA, 152 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Vladimir Nabokov, Stanley Kubrick
Photography: Oswald Morris
Music: Nelson Riddle
Editor: Anthony Harvey
Cast: James Mason, Shelley Winters, Sue Lyon, Peter Sellers

Vladimir Nabokov, author of the novel on which this is based, gets full credit in the titles for the screenplay of Lolita, but later tales of the production make it clear it's actually much more the work of director Stanley Kubrick. Certainly it's hard for me to believe that Nabokov would have been responsible for the awkward frame here, where James Mason as Humbert Humbert confronts a scenery-chewing Peter Sellers as Clare Quilty in a disorientingly trashed mansion setting. That kind of storytelling device seems more a convention of the early '60s, or perhaps more generally just of movies. But the preamble especially seems to me wasted time in an arguably already too-long picture, and the closing few minutes don't add much either.

Well, they serve as showcase for Peter Sellers, which I suspect was the intent as much as anything. Sellers was a gifted screen comic, a kind of Robin Williams of his time, but I'm not sure Kubrick knew what to do with him as much as he might have thought, here or in Dr. Strangelove either. In what turns out to be more of a concise chamber drama enacted by a small cast set in the middle of a sprawling and almost kinda sorta lurid road movie (it was of course impossible to be as explicit as the material required), Sellers often seems to me the weak link.

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

UK/USA, 141 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Stanley Kubrick
Photography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Editor: Ray Lovejoy
Cast: Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, Douglas Rain

In case you ever need it for a trivia contest, the first line of dialogue in this movie is, "Here you are, sir. Main level, please." And it occurs 25 minutes in. That's the level of pure cinematic experience on which we are operating here, which in its totality is nearly as baffling as the overall effectiveness of this picture itself.

It's not easy to defend to detractors—because it's not hard to find endless examples here of the monumentally silly. From what are obviously actors in ape suits in the opening sequence (bombastically entitled "THE DAWN OF MAN") to the typical inability of science fiction films before 1990 to predict anything like the Internet or cell phones (the always popular video phone does put in an appearance but phone calls, even in outer space, are still made from phone booths, and there doesn't appear to be anything like voicemail) to no apparent changes in fashion since 1968 to the hackneyed-even-then computer gone amok to using a geometric figure as some kind of religious agent of evolution (a black monolith, really?) to the general incoherence of the narrative, this movie should not work. It should fail abjectly and miserably simply from being so painfully ham-handed.