The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Danny Lloyd, Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, Anne Jackson. Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson. Cinematography: John Alcott. Production design: Roy Walker. Film editing: Ray Lovejoy. Music: Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind.

There are those of us who don't love The Shining. There used to be a lot more of us: When it first opened, Stanley Kubrick's movie met with lukewarm reviews and a general feeling that it was a well-made but not particularly interesting horror movie. Today, the word tossed about often is "masterpiece," and the ranking on IMDb is a whopping 8.4 out of a possible 10. But for me the film is all tricks and no payoff, and the central problem is Jack Nicholson. I know, it's an intensely committed performance, like all of his. But it's one-note crazy almost from the start, partly because the demonic eyebrows and sharklike grin are in full play. Jack Torrance should go mad, nut just be mad, and Kubrick hasn't allowed Nicholson to make the transition of which the actor is fully capable. But Kubrick is less interested in creating characters than in playing with shock effects. Shelley Duvall is forced to turn from a loving and resourceful mother to a blithering nutcase before reverting to the former by the end of the film. Then, too, there are the clichés on which the story is based: the isolated hotel built on the old Indian burying ground, the hedge maze, the kindly but obviously doomed Black man, and so on. Even the supernatural elements are muddled: What does the extrasensory communication, the "shining" of Danny (Danny Lloyd) and Halloran (Scatman Crothers), have to do with the presence of ghosts in the hotel beyond being a way to provide a rescue at the end? The film works for me only if I let myself take on some of its director's notorious cold detachment, and I want movies to let me do more than just admire technique.

A Clockwork Orange (Stanley Kubrick, 1971)

Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange

Alex: Malcolm McDowell
Dim: Warren Clarke
Georgie: James Marcus
Pete: Michael Tarn
Mr. Alexander: Patrick Magee
Mrs. Alexander: Adrienne Corri
Deltoid: Aubrey Morris
Catlady: Miriam Karlin
Minister: Anthony Sharp

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick
Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess
Cinematography: John Alcott
Production design: John Barry
Costume design: Milena Canonero
Film editing: Bill Butler

Any movie that was panned by Pauline Kael, Andrew Sarris, and Roger Ebert can't be all bad, can it? A Clockwork Orange remains one of Stanley Kubrick's most popular films, with an 8.4 rating on IMDb and a 90% fresh rating (93% audience score) on Rotten Tomatoes.  I think it's a tribute to Kubrick that the movie can elicit such widely divergent responses. I can see what Kael, Sarris, and Ebert are complaining about while at the same time admitting that the film is undeniably entertaining in a "horrorshow" way: that being both novelist Anthony Burgess's Nadsat coinage from the Russian word "khorosho," meaning "good," and the English literal sense. For it is a kind of horror movie, with Alex as the monster spawned by modern society -- implacable, controlled only by the most drastic and abhorrent means, in this case a kind of behavioral conditioning. Watching it this time I was struck by how much the aversion therapy to which Alex is subjected reminds me of the attempts to convert gay people to heterosexuality. Which is not to say that Kubrick's film isn't exploitative in the extreme, relying on images of violence and sexuality that almost justify Kael's suggestion that Kubrick is a kind of failed pornographer. It is not the kind of movie that should go without what today are called "trigger warnings." What's good about A Clockwork Orange is certainly Malcolm McDowell's performance as Alex, one of the few really complex human beings in Kubrick's caricature-infested films. Some of his most memorable scenes in the movie were partly improvised, as when he sings "Singin' in the Rain" during his attack on the Alexanders, and when he opens his mouth like a bird when the minister of the interior is feeding him. Kubrick received three Oscar nominations, as producer, director, and screenwriter, and film editor Bill Butler was also nominated, but the movie won none, losing in all four categories to The French Connection (William Friedkin, 1971). It deserved nominations not only for McDowell, but also for John Alcott's cinematography and John Barry's production design.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)

Dave Bowman: Keir Dullea
Frank Poole: Gary Lockwood
HAL 9000: Douglas Rain (voice)

Director: Stanley Kubrick
Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke
Based on a story by Arthur C. Clarke
Cinematography: Geoffrey Unsworth
Production design: Ernest Archer, Harry Lange, Anthony Masters

I know that I first saw 2001 on April 13, 1968, because that (as a little Googling tells me) was the date of the lunar eclipse I witnessed on leaving the theater in Boston, an appropriately cosmic climax to the cinematic experience I had just had. Kubrick's film was an experience to be savored by those of us who were already hip to the revolution in American filmmaking underway after the sensation of Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967) and The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967). I doubt that anyone who wasn't of an age to experience it realizes quite how revolutionary those movies seemed to us. Though it's conventional to say that our experiences were produced in part by controlled substances, anyone who really knows me knows that I wasn't under the influence of any substance stronger than beer. Today, 2001 doesn't seem much like a revolutionary film: We have lived through the actual 2001, which had its own epoch-making event in the September of that year, but in which no one was making trips to the moon on Pan Am. That airline went out of business in 1991, and the last real moon expedition, Apollo 17, took place in December 1972. But the future is never quite what it's cracked up to be. What was revolutionary about 2001 the movie is that it taught us how a movie can make us think without spelling out its ideas for us. Kubrick wisely whittled down the narrative given him by Arthur C. Clarke to a series of images, and ditched the score written by Alex North for an evocative set of snippets from classical works, letting us assemble any meaning to be derived from the film for ourselves. Of course, in 1968 we went back to our apartments and dorm rooms and did just that. Seeing it today, I am most struck by how skillful Kubrick was in creating the persona of HAL, the sentient computer. Much credit goes, of course, to the voiceover work of Douglas Rain, but also to Kubrick's choice to make the dialogue of the humans in the movie as banal and jargon-filled as possible. HAL's final pleading and breakdown as Dave pulls his memory chips is haunting. Yes, the movie has its longueurs: Kubrick is deservedly proud of its landmark special effects and spends more time than is necessary showing them off. They won him the film's only Oscar, without honoring the work of Douglas Trumbull and others who executed them. He was also nominated as director and as co-screenwriter with Clarke, and the art direction team received a nod, but the film was passed over for the significant work of cinematographer Geoffrey Unsworth, who was assisted by John Alcott, and for the sound crew headed by Winston Ryder. And it failed to receive a best picture nomination in the year when that award went to Oliver! (Carol Reed, 1968). I happen to like Oliver! and don't think it's necessarily one of the Academy's more shameful choices, but it's certainly not an epochal movie.

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

From the rather uninvolved performance he gives here, it's a little hard to realize that Ryan O'Neal was once a major movie star. Scenes are stolen from him right and left by such skilled character actors as Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Murray Melvin, Leonard Rossiter, and Leon Vitale. But this detachment of the titular character seems to be part of Kubrick's plan to de-emphasize the story's drama: He even provides a narrator (Michael Hordern) who gives away the plot before it develops on the screen. When actions and emotions erupt in the story, they do so with a kind of jolt, the audience having been lulled by the stately pace of the film and by the undeniably gorgeous visuals: Ken Adam's production design, Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero's costumes, and John Alcott's cinematography all won Oscars, as did Leonard Rosenman's orchestration of themes from Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Handel. It is undeniably one of the most visually beautiful films ever made, its images intentionally echoing works by Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, and other 18th-century artists. Alcott used specially designed lenses, created for NASA to allow low-light filming, to allow many scenes to be filmed by candlelight. But it's also a painfully slow movie, stretching to more than three hours. I don't have anything against slowness: One of my favorite movies, Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), is often criticized for slowness. But the slowness of Ozu's film is in service of characters we come to know and care about. Kubrick gives us no one to care about very much, and O'Neal's Barry never registers as a developed character.