Steven Spielberg's futuristic tale (a project taken over from the late Stanley Kubrick) of the first robot programmed to love. Not, let's be clear, one of those old-hat technological advances on the porn-shop inflatable love-doll, equipped with "sensuality simulators" and such. But rather, a "mecha-child" (short for mechanical child), placed …
Anthony Burgess's vision of the ultraviolent future (the novelist's linguistic inventions are carefully preserved and provide the movie with its strongest prop) becomes, in film form, wholly a pander to the youth market. Stanley Kubrick's frost-bitten, arm-waving, gimmicky direction seems very nearly distraught, willing to try almost anything, just so …
In light of the fact that it was made by a director of at least moderate stature -- Lawrence Kasdan of Body Heat, The Accidental Tourist, Mumford, etc. -- this might have raised higher anticipation than most Stephen King adaptations, till you remind yourself of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Like …
Stanley Kubrick's scattershot spoof on the military in the push-button age. Several of the players — Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, and Peter Sellers in two of his three roles — have their own assigned areas well under control, while Kubrick darts helter-skelter in eagerly salivating pursuit of comedy material …
Stanley Kubrick's posthumous opus, twelve years after his previous one, with an off-puttingly grainy, gritty, speckly image. It is not hard to believe he had wanted to make it for a long, long time. There's a moldy Sexual Revolution air about it that dates it by a good two or …
Valued assistant or obsequious stooge? Tony Zierra’s documentary answers the question. On the surface, Leon Vitale was to Stanley Kubrick what Jilly Rizzo was to Frank Sinatra: a camp-following aide-de-camp, always eager to empty the boss’s ashtrays or gratefully accept another twenty lashes from his master’s flailing tongue. (According to …
A rather barren opening stretch of forty-five minutes or so in Marine boot camp, photographed in a shade of algae-green, trimmed with mildew-white, to ensure that the viewer's eyeballs have no pleasanter a time of it than the enlistees' bodies. After that, there is a marked improvement, all the way …
The moon landing was, among other things, possibly the greatest PR stunt America ever fashioned for itself. So even if it wasn’t a hoax executed by the late director Stanley Kubrick, it seems perfectly reasonable to assume that someone had a Plan B in case things went FUBAR. To wit: …
Stanley Kubrick's anti-war drama starring Kirk Douglas and written by Jim Thompson.
The Shining is my go-to Stanley Kubrick film. But after numerous viewings, thoughts of Native American genocide, Hitler’s ovens, and/or the director helping to fake the Apollo moon landing have never once come up for discussion. Listen to the filmmakers, and Room 237 is a black eye to serious film …
The movie starts out as if it is going to be about the psychic powers of a little boy with an imaginary playmate named Tony nesting in his mouth and transmitting messages to him through his index finger. Before long, however, an irreversible shift from the boy's powers gets underway …
Big, brassy, vulgar, and -- above all -- entertaining historical piece about a slaves' revolt in the Roman Empire (First Century B.C.). The plebes tend to be played by American actors, and the patricians by British (including the movie-stealing Peter Ustinov as dean of a gladiator school). The casting concept …
Life imitates art, even in Fifties Hollywood: here it's the leading man and leading lady of a low-budget boxing melodrama whose off-screen relationship takes uncannily after their on-screen one. The film-within-the-film, and presumably the title of the film-without, is modelled on Stanley Kubrick's Killer's Kiss, and the parallels of this …
Sergio Martino’s giallo take on Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” is similar to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, but much twistier and trashier and about an hour shorter. (The Shining still wins for sheer quantities of blood, but Vice has more lovingly depicted violence.) As in Kubrick’s classic, you’ve got …