As I wrote recently, this tradition dates back decades, particularly with certain directors whose cinematic output just isn’t the same on a TV, laptop, or god forbid on an iPhone on the subway riding to work. David Lean is one of them, Akira Kurosawa another. And then there’s Kubrick.

Stanley Kubrick, the chess player turned photojournalist turned master filmmaker, produced thirteen feature films in the course of a five-decade career. Of those thirteen, at least ten are masterpieces. But then I haven’t seen them all yet, an oversight I aim to correct over the next month, thanks to Cineplex and its recently announced Kubrick Retrospective.

Anyone remotely interested in big screen spectacle – and that includes anyone who loved Dune, Oppenheimer, or any number of other recent special effects extravaganzas – owes it to themselves to check out at least some of these screenings. Read on for summaries and my thoughts on which ones to prioritize…

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): Saturday, April 6; Sunday, April 21 and Wednesday, May 1
The greatest movie of all time, you say? Just go with an open mind and enjoy the trip.

Fear and Desire (1952): Friday, March 29 and Saturday, April 13
Kubrick would later disown this, his debut feature, and it’s easy to see why. A clumsy anti-war allegory, Kiss is most notable for featuring future director/writer/actor Paul Mazursky in a supporting role.

Paths of Glory (1957): Wednesday, April 3; Sunday, April 14 and Tuesday, April 30
Kubrick’s second anti-war picture is an unequivocal masterpiece, starring Kirk Douglas as a WWI colonel who must defend a group of soldiers at a court-martial hearing after they refuse to carry out suicidal orders.

Dr. Strangelove (1964): Monday, April 1; Sunday, April 14 and Friday, April 26
The funniest anti-war satire this side of In the Loop, Kubrick’s pitch-black nuclear comedy remains (sadly) timeless.

Full Metal Jacket (1987): Thursday, April 11; Monday, April 22 and Tuesday, April 30
Kubrick’s final anti-war film ups the stakes, the violence, and the insanity. From its opening training camp sequence through the hazy psychedelia of the Vietnam scenes, it’s a fascinating and deeply disturbing commentary on military culture.

The Killing (1956): Tuesday, April 2 and Wednesday, April 17
Kubrick’s first major work, The Killing is an exciting proto-Tarantino thriller about a group of very incompetent criminals getting themselves in very big trouble.

Spartacus (1960): Tuesday, April 23 and Sunday, April 28
Kirk Douglas also stars here, in the best sandals-and-toga flick ever made, about the heroic figure who led a slave uprising against the Roman Empire in the first century BCE. An all-star supporting cast includes Tony Curtis, Jean Simmons, Laurence Olivier, and Peter Ustinov.

A Clockwork Orange (1971): Friday, April 5; Thursday, April 18 and Sunday, April 28
Bleak, haunting, and not for all tastes, this is Kubrick at his most cynical. The opening act is particularly off-putting, though it does improve from there as unlikely protagonist Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell)’s saga gets stranger and stranger. Viewer caution is strongly advised.

The Shining (1980): Wednesday, April 10; Friday, April 19 and Thursday, April 25
One of the scariest movies ever made, The Shining has lost none of its, well, shine, in the forty-four years since it was released. Essential for horror aficionados.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999): Friday, April 12; Saturday, April 20 and Saturday, April 27
Kubrick’s final film, released after his death, is an imperfect but fascinating depiction of a deeply flawed marriage, featuring two Very Beautiful People (then-married couple Tom Curtis and Nicole Kidman) behaving very badly.

Finally, there are the three films I’ve never seen, so I can’t comment (yet!):
Killer’s Kiss (1955): Friday, March 29 and Saturday, April 13

Lolita (1962): Sunday, April 7 and Tuesday, April 18

And, I can’t believe I’ve never seen it, the multiple Academy Award-winning Barry Lyndon (1975): Sunday, March 31 and Sunday, April 21

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Tickets for Cineplex’s Stanley Kubrick Retrospective can be purchased here. On now through May 1, 2024.

Participating cinemas in Ontario include:
Cineplex Cinemas Yonge-Dundas and VIP, Toronto, ON
Cineplex Odeon Eglinton Town Centre Cinemas, Scarborough, ON
Cineplex Odeon Ajax Cinemas, Ajax, ON
Galaxy Cinemas Barrie, Barrie, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Winston Churchill & VIP, Oakville, ON
Galaxy Cinemas Peterborough, Peterborough, ON
Cineplex Odeon Niagara Square Cinemas, Niagara Falls, ON
Cineplex Odeon South Keys Cinemas, Ottawa, ON
Galaxy Cinemas Guelph, Guelph, ON
Cineplex Cinemas Vaughan, Woodbridge, ON
SilverCity Burlington Cinemas, Burlington, ON
SilverCity Sudbury Cinemas, Sudbury, ON
SilverCity Thunder Bay Cinemas, Thunder Bay, ON

The post Kubrick Retrospective Brings Big Screen Masterpieces Back Where They Belong appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). To date the most successful pairing of arthouse sensibilities with pure Hollywood spectacle, Stanley Kubrick’s psychedelic masterpiece remains as ripe for competing interpretations today as it did at release, one year prior to the moon landing. A sci-fi meditation on sentience, evolution, and what lies beyond the infinite, it’s a heady, dizzying trip, equal parts thrilling and thought-provoking. The only entry on this list that must be seen on a big screen, it’s my favourite film of all time (by one of the greatest directors of all time, no less).

2. City Lights (1931). Charlie Chaplin was and will forever be the everytramp, his on-screen persona capturing, with a deft comic touch, what it means to live in these deeply unequal, habitually confusing modern times. City‘s depiction of hypocritical politicians, intoxicated millionaires, and the endless travails of one lowly tramp and the blind flower girl he loves, rings just as true today as it did ninety years ago. Chaplin’s affection and sympathy for humanity, especially the lowly and the downtrodden, never once rings false. Also, City Lights is hilarious.

3. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). There’s a pathetic quality to Kwai, with its central character – Sir Alec Guinness, in a career-best performance as Lt. Col. Nicholson – led so astray by notions of honour that audiences can be blind to the moment when he ceases being the film’s hero. There are plenty of great war films, and there are plenty of great antiwar films, but Kwai is perhaps the only one in the first category to so accurately capture the futility, absurdity, and meaninglessness of war interrogated in the latter.

4. Fanny and Alexander (1982). Even better in its original miniseries form, Ingmar Bergman’s magnum opus is the culmination of everything he ever wanted to say about love, hate, indifference, obsession, childhood, ageing, innocence, guilt, and humanity’s fraught relationship with its gods. The cinematic proof of Tolstoy’s adage, “happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, it follows only two years in the lives of the dysfunctional yet loving Ekdahl family, and yet contains several lifetimes’ worth of experience. With apologies to Truffaut, this is the best film about childhood ever made.

5. Rashōmon (1950). Often imitated but never surpassed, Akira Kurosawa’s murder mystery-cum-ghost story is really a story about stories. A samurai has died, and several witnesses provide accounts which, though different in key ways, contain intriguing synchronicities which suggest that no one version is the whole truth. Its brilliant framing device – a woodcutter and a priest recount the stories told by witnesses to a crime, those competing accounts in turn played out on-screen for the benefit of the viewer – contains layers upon layers of ambiguity. That the film’s central mystery is inherently unsolvable is almost beside the point; Rashōmon is about the power of storytelling itself.

6. Some Like It Hot (1959). It may not be the funniest movie ever made, but it does have the single best final line in cinematic history. While I won’t spoil it here, there’s something special about that one sentence, which serves as the perfect punchline to a riotously funny story while also managing to say something essential about the human condition. Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis are hysterically funny as bandmates hiding from the mob by going undercover as a pair of female musicians (Some Like It Hot remains rightly acclaimed as a boundary-pushing work of proto-queer cinema), but Marilyn Monroe shines brightest as Sugar “Kane” Kowalczyk, lead singer of Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopators. Monroe, an actress of often overlooked comedic talents, was never funnier.

7. Nashville (1975). 1975 was a hell of a year for cinema, delivering landmark films as disparate as Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and even Sight and Sound‘s newly anointed #1 film of all time. But only one film perfectly captured the post-Watergate, post-innocence zeitgeist, an impressive feat given its superficially niche subject matter – the Nashville music scene. Altman’s rambling style was never put to better use than in this piercing satire, which follows musicians, lowlifes, political operatives, a young Jeff Goldblum on a giant motorcycle, in the days leading up to a political rally. We never see Hal Phillip Walker, the film’s “outsider” presidential candidate, but we regularly hear his voice, spouting ludicrously meaningless phrases out of a loudspeaker mounted on the roof of a van. “When you pay more for an automobile than it cost Columbus to make his first voyage to America, that’s politics” – a populist slogan so dumb it could only be mistaken for brilliance by the American electorate.

8. Dog Day Afternoon (1975). The ne plus ultra of New Hollywood, made by a director (Sidney Lumet) and actor (Al Pacino) at the peak of their powers, it functions as both a taut thriller and a damning indictment of a uniquely American brand of inequality. After a botched bank robbery makes unwilling hostage-takers out of Sonny (Al Pacino) and Sal (John Cazale), the resultant media circus turns them into even more unlikely celebrities. Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson use this incident (based on a real hostage crisis) as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on state violence – the spectre of the then-recent Attica Prison Riot looms large over this film – alongside (light spoilers) a surprisingly nuanced portrayal of LGBTQ+ identities.

9. Cabaret (1972). By any measure the saddest movie musical ever made, Bob Fosse’s lightning-in-a-bottle adaptation of the Kander and Ebb musical takes everything interesting about the stage production, introduces several new songs – including eternal hits “Mein Herr” and “Money, Money” – and then strips it of everything else. That includes, most significantly, removing every musical number not performed in-universe by a character singing for an audience. This single, brilliant choice means that the world of Cabaret feels real and lived in, and makes Cabaret one of the few musicals in which it actually makes sense when characters burst into song. That believability is key to what is fundamentally a tragic story, set in 1930s Berlin amidst the rise of the Nazi Party.

10. La Dolce Vita (1960). There are many iconic images to be found in Federico Fellini’s masterpiece, but if I had to pick one, it wouldn’t be Anita Ekberg in the Trevi Fountain, or even the film’s enigmatic final beach shot. I’d still go with Ekberg, appearing here as the dubiously Swedish-accented “American” actress Sylvia Rank, but I’d choose the moment just before Trevi when she picks up a tiny white kitten and places it on top of her head. The delicate, precious kitten never looks anything less than terrified, making for a cinema-perfect incongruity between the adorableness of the animal, the fear in its expression, the glamour of the actress who only wishes to be surrounded by beauty, and the absurdity of her would-be paramour (played by cinema’s greatest leading man Marcello Mastroianni) dashing off into the night to find a saucer of milk. If that isn’t the definition of the sweet life, I don’t know what is.

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Check out the Sight and Sound Critics’ Top 100 here.
For our 2020 feature on Films for the Apocalypse, click here.

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