Stanley Kubrick

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A ficticious war in an unidentified country provides the setting for this drama. Four soldiers survive the crash-landing of their plane to find themselves in a forest six miles behind enemy lines. The group, led by Lt. Corby, has a plan: They’ll make their way to a nearby river, build a raft, and then, under cover of night, float back to friendly territory. Their plans for getting back safely are sidetracked by a young woman who stumbles across them as they hide in the woods, and by the nearby presence of an enemy general who one member of the group is determined to kill.Read More »

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A short documentary about the early life and feature films of the great Stanley Kubrick, as narrated by himself. The narration was pulled from interviews that took place in 1966 with Jeremy Bernstein. Bernstein was writing a profile on the director and used these recordings as a chance to gather information. As it turns out the tapes themselves were a rare and incredibly interesting insight into the mind of Kubrick. Its also a glimpse at the director before his “masterpieces” such as ‘2001 : A Space Odyssey’ and ‘The Shining’ had been made. The films mentioned are as followsRead More »

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In Stanley Kubrick’s “Paths of Glory” war is viewed in terms of power. This mesmerizing, urgent film about a true episode in World War I combines the idea that class differences are more important than national differences with the cannon-fodder theory of war, the theory that soldiers are merely pawns in the hands of generals who play at war is if it were a game of chess. The result of this amazing film has been the emergence of one of the great talents in contemporary cinema, the master whose greatest work was yet to come.Read More »

Description: Narrated by Tom Cruise, “Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures” goes through each one of his movies and talks to various participants about their memories of working with Kubrick. For those who know very little about Kubrick, the documentary is an excellent career overview.Read More »

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Shortly after Stanley Kubrick had completed his first film for RKO – the short subject Day of the Fight (1951) – the studio offered him a follow-up project for their Screenliner series which specialized in short human-interest documentaries. The subject of their proposal was the Reverend Fred Stadmueller, a priest at Saint Joseph’s Church in Mosquero, New Mexico. Known to his parishioners as the “Flying Padre” because he owned a small, single-engine plane that allowed him to visit his church members who were spread out over a four thousand mile area, Stadmueller was an inspiration to the mostly Spanish-American farmers and ranchers who made up his congregation.Read More »

After discovering a mysterious artifact buried beneath the Lunar surface, mankind sets off on a quest to find its origins with help from intelligent supercomputer H.A.L. 9000.Read More »

After his wife, Alice, tells him about her sexual fantasies, William Harford sets out for a night of sexual adventure. After several less than successful encounters, he meets an old friend, Nick Nightingale – now a musician – who tells him of strange sex parties when he is required to play the piano blindfolded. All the men at the party are costumed and wear masks while the women are all young and beautiful. Harford manages to find an appropriate costume and heads out to the party. Once there, however, he is warned by someone who recognizes him, despite the mask, that he is in great danger. He manages to extricate himself but the threats prove to be quite real and sinister.Read More »

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Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.Read More »