13) Killer’s Kiss (1955)
One night, unlucky boxer Davey hears screams coming from the home of his attractive neighbor Gloria.
Having long admired her from a distance, Davey convinces Gloria to run away from her abusive gangster boss, Vincent, but their escape is complicated when mobsters kill Davey’s manager and blame him for the crime.
There are flashes of Kubrick’s future brilliance, but this is a generic film, only interesting because it was one of the few times he filmed an original story.
12) Fear and Desire (1953)
When an airplane crashes behind enemy lines, the four surviving soldiers build a raft to escape. When a young native girl stumbles upon their camp, they tie her to a tree where a mentally disturbed soldier kills her.
Two of the soldiers sneak onto the enemy base, murdering an opposing general and his subordinate, but are disturbed to find the dead men look exactly like them.
Kubrick’s first film shows promise, but it’s too blunt and naive.
11) The Killing (1956)
Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) plans an audacious final heist, robbing two million from a racetrack during a race. His team includes a corrupt cop, a window teller (Elisha Cook Jr.) a sharpshooter, a wrestler, and a bartender.
The elaborate plan works, but the lover of the teller’s unfaithful wife robs the group at their rendezvous. Johnny survives, but his escape is thwarted by poor luggage choices.
This fun, popcorn movie planted seeds for later heist movies like Ocean’s Twelve (2004), and The Town (2010).
10) Spartacus (1960)
When Roman Senator Crassus (Laurence Olivier) buys Varinia (Jean Simmons), her enraged lover, the gladiator Spartacus (Kirk Douglas), murders his trainers and instigates a revolt.
As the Senate grapples with the insurrection, a power struggle develops between Graccus (Charles Laughton) and Crassus, who uses the crisis to solidify his power, forcing Spartacus to kill his spiritual son Antonius (Tony Curtis) before crucifying him.
Inspired by the success of Ben-Hur (1959), Kirk Douglas shepherded this epic film to the screen, and his performance is transcendent.
One year after Some Like it Hot (1959), Tony Curtis was at the height of his career.
Laurence Olivier gives a wonderfully nuanced performance and his seduction of Antonius with an extended discussion of eating oysters and snails is creepy and sensual.
Nearing the end of his life, Laughton is electric. His plodding, slow, quintessentially British delivery is perfectly utilized and the interplay between Gracchus and Crassus rivals the subtle political games played by Frank Underwood.
Amazingly, Peter Ustinov became the only person from a Kubrick directed film to win an Oscar. He’s good as Batiatus, a schemer who operates on the outskirts of political power, but by no means the best performer in the film.
Blacklisted for refusing to name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, screenwriter Dalton Trumbo supported himself by writing anonymous screenplays until Douglas insisted he receive credit for his work on this film, ending the blacklist.
It’s not the best film of his career, but Kubrick’s only epic is better than most.
9) Lolita (1962)
Professor Humbert Humbert (James Mason) marries widow Charlotte Haze (Shelley Winters) to be close to her 13-year-old daughter, Dolores (nicknamed Lolita).
After Charlotte is killed in a car accident, Humbert takes his step-daughter on a road trip, during which the two begin a sexual relationship.
Dr. Zempf (Peter Sellers) convinces Humbert to allow Lolita to appear in a high school play, but Humbert’s paranoia causes him to take her on the road again. When Lolita gets sick, he takes her to the doctor, and she disappears.
Years later, Humbert gets a letter from a pregnant Lolita needing money. He gives her the money and learns she left him for a famous playwright, Claire Quilty (who earlier posed as Dr. Zempf) after he seduced her with promises of a glamorous acting career. Enraged, Humbert murders Quilty.
James Mason, the epitome of the suave Englishman, makes the lecherous Humbert debonair and charming. Sellers is amazing, and his Dr. Zempf disguise recalls his earlier work as Dr. Strangelove. Shelley Winters is perfectly cast as the annoying and needy Ms. Haze.
This beautiful film about unbeautiful things simplifies much of the unpleasantness of Nabokov’s novel, allowing us to observe its grotesque characters dispassionately.
The movie implies Humbert’s obsession is beyond his control, and Lolita is less victim of an unhinged sexual predator and more romantic partner.
The central relationship is creepy, but it’s only a few steps removed from Barely Legal, or the marriage of J. Howard Marshall and Anna Nicole Smith. Kubrick makes an honest film about our conflation of youth and beauty, forcing us to look at our own murky attitudes about prepubescent sex.
8) Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Disturbed when his wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) tells him about a recent sexual fantasy, Bill Hartford (Tom Cruise) embarks on a sexual odyssey. He meets a prostitute with HIV and a costume shop owner who pimps his teenage daughter, before eventually crashing a private costumed orgy for the wealthy and powerful.
Eventually, Bill tearfully confesses everything he witnessed to his wife, who tenderly embraces him, renewing their relationship.
The real life marriage of Kidman and Cruise creates a voyeuristic verisimilitude, but the explicit sexuality is a red herring. This is not an exercise in titillation, but a celebration of faithfulness. The point is not Bill’s orgiastic adventure, the point is he told his wife about it, and his confession created a powerful intimacy with no hidden agenda or secrets.
7) 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
There’s a lot to love. The matching shot of a rotating bone and a spaceship. The music, particularly “Also spake Zarathustra.” The beautiful, poetic depiction of weightlessness.
The enigmatic monolith and the perplexing star child are arresting and thought-provoking, and HAL is a magnificent creation, the first in the now seemingly infinite warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence.
The first three sections are brilliant, but Bowman’s journey through light in the fourth section feels like a big budget Stan Brakhage film. It’s too dense and ambiguous.
The monumental importance of this film in the science fiction canon is not in doubt, but it’s not Stanley Kubrick’s best film.
6) A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell) leads a gang of evil, violent criminals. One night, they cripple author F. Alexander and rape his wife while DeLarge sings “Singin’ in the Rain.” After Alex’s degenerate friends set him up to take the fall for one of their crimes, he’s arrested and imprisoned. During his incarceration, he’s subjected to the Ludovico technique, an extreme form of aversion therapy designed to make him physically ill whenever he thinks of violence.
“Cured” of his violent tendencies, Alex is released. His former gang, now police officers, take advantage of his new weakness and savagely beat him. He survives their attack and seeks refuge in the nearby home of F. Alexander who, after recognizing his whistling, tortures him until he attempts suicide.
Alex awakes at the hospital where embarrassed government ministers apologize for their mistreatment of him. Unbeknownst to them, his experience reversed the effects of the aversion therapy, and he’s once again capable of violence.
The X-rated violence and graphic sex strip away any sympathy we have for Alex, but the cruelty of his treatment is difficult to ignore. This film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s novel asks us if it’s okay to cure him of his undesirable impulses if it means removing his humanity.
5) Full Metal Jacket (1987)
In 1967, a set of US Marine Corps recruits, including James “Joker” Davis (Matthew Modine), and Leonard “Gomer Pyle” Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio), arrive for basic training where Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) breaks them down with cruel precision.
Tragically, his sadistic techniques prove too much for the simpleminded Lawrence.
After training, Joker becomes a war correspondent. At the beginning of the Tet Offensive, his squad locates a deadly sniper only to discover it’s a teenage girl. After Joker is forced to execute her, he shows symptoms of PTSD.
Vincent D’Onofrio is perfection as the slowly deteriorating Pyle, Ermey’s Hartman is just callous enough without devolving into caricature, and Matthew Modine is exactly the generic everyman the film needs.
The first half is electric, but once the film shifts to combat, it loses momentum and becomes just another film about the quagmire of Vietnam.
4) Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
US Air Force Brigadier General Jack Ripper (Sterling Hayden) irrationally believes the Soviets are poisoning the water supply of the United States. To combat the imagined, nefarious plot, he surreptitiously initiates a preemptive nuclear attack without the knowledge of President Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers). Fortunately, British Captain Lionel Mandrake (also Peter Sellers) discovers the plot and alerts the Pentagon.
Back in DC, General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) meets with President Muffley and former Nazi, Dr. Strangelove (once again Peter Sellers) to discuss strategy.
Due to malfunctioning communications systems, the plane piloted by Major J.T. “King” Kong (Slim Pickens) does not receive the order to abort the mission, and Kong inadvertently rides the bomb to its Russian target. The detonation triggers the Russian doomsday device ensuring the Earth’s surface will be uninhabitable for one hundred years.
Scott is brilliantly over the top as Turgdison, Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove and his mysterious, uncontrollable hand is a comic masterpiece, and Slim Pickens catching a ride to oblivion has become one of the most delectable images in film history.
Kubrick masterfully uses Cold War promises of mutually assured destruction to inform one of the funniest movies of all time.
3) Barry Lyndon (1975)
Redmond Barry (Ryan O’Neal) had an unfortunate childhood. His father was killed in a duel when he was young, and his attractive cousin tricked him to avoid marriage. A listless solider, he steals an officer’s uniform and deserts after his captain is wounded at the Battle of Minden, but Prussian Captain Potzford convinces him to join the Prussian army.
Post-war, he thinks his luck has turned when he marries a wealthy widow, the Countess of Lyndon (Marisa Berenson), but in the second half of the film, his destitute mother moves in with him, his young son dies in a horse riding accident, and Lady Lyndon’s son from her first marriage, Lord Bullingdon, convinces him to leave in exchange for a paltry five hundred guinea annuity.
The likable rogue Barry Lyndon reminds me of Tom Jones, except in Fielding’s novel, divine providence unwinds the intricate plot in the protagonist’s favor, while this film, inspired by a Thackeray novel is filled with a pervading sense of doom; it’s Tom Jones without God’s grace.
Using cameras designed for the lunar landings, cinematographer John Alcott avoided electric light and shot several scenes by candlelight. The effect transports us to a different era in a way typical costume dramas don’t. This beautiful film doesn’t romanticize the past, but illuminates it on its own terms.
2) Paths of Glory (1957)
During World War I, French General Georges Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) orders his subordinate, General Mireau to attack a well-defended German position. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) tries to stop the suicidal plan, but his superiors refuse to heed his warning.
After the overwhelmed regiment retreats, Mireau announces he’ll court martial one hundred of the surviving solders for cowardice, but Broulard magnanimously narrows it to three.
A former lawyer, Dax valiantly defends the men, but they’re convicted and executed by firing squad
This haunting film poignantly illustrates the harm and psychological devastation of war at a time when shell shock was still reviled as cowardice.
1) The Shining (1980)
Writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) takes a job as winter caretaker at the Overlook Hotel. Haunted by the evil spirits populating the former Native American burial ground, Jack loses his mind and unsuccessfully attempts to kill his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and young son, Danny.
Much has been written about the dense symbolism and imagery of Stanley Kubrik’s masterpiece, and there’s a documentary dedicated to the numerous conspiracy theories surrounding the film.
Contrary to what Mr. King said in the afterword to his sequel, Doctor Sleep, this is far superior to the original novel and many of the scenes from Jack Torrance’s harrowing descent into madness have rightly become iconic.