Starring Kirk Douglas in a most fitting role as the eponymous Spartacus, Kubrick’s adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel presents him not as the sharp, detached artist he came to be but as the studio auteur he once was. With Russell Metty as his Director of Photography and Dalton Trumbo co-writing the script, the film comes from the …
Paths of Glory is Stanley Kubrick’s first masterpiece. Some would argue that honor would go to his prior film The Killing, which is a fantastic, even great film, but to Paths of Glory, Kubrick brought the austere nature that would become his trademark for the first time. This is also the first work of Kubrick’s that has the feeling of …
Based on the novel The Short-Timers by Gustav Hasford, Full Metal Jacket is Stanley Kubrick’s attempt at an exposition on the Vietnam War. This tenuous time in America’s foreign policy history has been turf for other famous directors since the end of the war; Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Stone’s trilogy (which included Platoon …
With A Clockwork Orange (1971), Stanley Kubrick crafted what is now a most iconic, infamous, and oft referenced depiction of violence. Based on the same-titled book by Anthony Burgess, Kubrick brought to vision what the author once fostered in the American imagination. A film, like so many of Kubrick‘s others, which …
In the early 1950s, young photographer Stanley Kubrick disparaged the state of filmmaking and arrogantly proclaimed he could do better. He attempted with his first film Fear and Desire, which he later (rightfully) suppressed stating it was amateurish and pretentious. Only recently has the George Eastman House, who …
After years of independently produced shorts and films, Stanley Kubrick would turn a chance meeting with a movie producer over a game of chess into what Roger Ebert called the director’s “first mature feature:” The Killing (1956). A fractured, late-cycle film noir, The Killing may have been ignored at the box office, but it …
I have to admit, in all honesty, that writing about my experience at TIFF’s Stanley Kubrick exhibit was overwhelming. I had a bit of a block in sitting down to write the experience, not because it was earth shattering or anything, but it was the end result after a year of anticipation. It’s like waiting for the …
How did they ever make a movie of Lolita? That was not only the marketing campaign in 1962 leading up to the release of Stanley Kubrick’s film but a genuinely good question. Director Stanley Kubrick made a decision to film the controversial 1958 Vladimir Nabokov novel Lolita, a novel about a European intellectual in his late …
The sound of rushing wind plays as the camera pans just above the clouds towards the tips of mountains peaking in the distance. The shot is a classic Kubrick device: by sweeping the screen with landscape shots he cleanses the viewers palate of everything else in their subconscious. The viewer has no choice, but be caught in …
It had been a grueling week, one that was only getting to get worse. My grandfather, the strongest man I know, had passed away six days ago and his funeral was two days away. I had been blessed with the honor of not only writing his newspaper obituary but also delivering his eulogy following his military funeral. My heart, soul and …