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The Killing (1956)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
Start here, because this is Kubrick's control at its most compact: 84 minutes, a racetrack robbery and a plan the film shows you piece by piece, out of order, as each gang member's part of the day replays from a new angle. A flat, semi-documentary narrator stitches the fragments together and is not always to be trusted. Sterling Hayden's newly released ex-con is all grim efficiency, and the ending is as cold and ironic as anything Kubrick did later. Once you have watched how carefully this machine is built, you will notice the same clockwork running under the grander films to come.
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Paths of Glory (1957)
8.4/10on IMDb
Released
Watch it next for the camera. The long tracking shots that glide through the French trenches of 1916, first with a general inspecting his men and later alongside a doomed assault, are where Kubrick's moving camera becomes an argument in itself. Kirk Douglas plays the colonel defending three soldiers picked as scapegoats for a failed attack, and at 87 minutes the film is as lean as The Killing but far angrier. Its portrait of the French command was provocative enough that it was banned in France for more than fifteen years. Keep those trenches in mind: Full Metal Jacket answers them three decades later.
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Spartacus (1960)
7.9/10on IMDb
Released
The one detour on the route, best taken straight after Paths of Glory because Kirk Douglas links them: as producer and star, he brought Kubrick in to replace Anthony Mann after shooting had begun, when the production was already set. That makes this the least personal film here, a big-studio epic with Kubrick working inside someone else's machine, and seeing it now makes the independence of everything that follows easier to appreciate. It is still a handsome, rousing spectacle, and it won four Oscars, including Peter Ustinov's for supporting actor and one for its color cinematography.
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Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
Here the cold humor that runs through all of Kubrick arrives at full strength. Peter Sellers plays three roles, the stiff-upper-lip Group Captain Mandrake, the hapless President Muffley and the scientist of the title, while a general's private nuclear strike plays out between a bomber, an air base and the Pentagon's War Room. Coming after the war films sharpens the joke: the same military logic that was tragic in the trenches becomes absurd once the men in charge gather to argue about it. It earned four Oscar nominations and won none, and it is the easiest Kubrick to recommend to anyone who thinks he is all chill and no laughs.
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Lolita (1962)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
Fresh from Strangelove, you will spot Peter Sellers again, this time as Clare Quilty, the shadow trailing James Mason's Humbert, with Kubrick shooting so he could catch whatever Sellers improvised. The film is most interesting for how it handles the novel. Under pressure from the Production Code, the book's most notorious material is implied rather than shown, and the result plays as a black comedy of manners. Vladimir Nabokov received the sole screenplay credit and an Oscar nomination, though Kubrick and producer James B. Harris reworked much of his script. It was also the first film Kubrick made in England, where all his later films were shot.
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Full Metal Jacket (1987)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
Jump ahead to 1987 to close the war films while Paths of Glory is still fresh. The first half, at a Marine boot camp, is the stretch everyone remembers, built around a ferocious drill instructor and a recruit coming apart; the second follows the same men into the street fighting in Hue. Both halves were shot in England, the training camp at Bassingbourn Barracks in Cambridgeshire and the ruined city in the abandoned gasworks at Beckton in east London, which says a lot about how completely Kubrick could build a world without leaving home. If the second half feels looser, that break in rhythm is part of the design.
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The Shining (1980)
8.4/10on IMDb
Released
By now you know how Kubrick uses corridors and symmetry, and the Overlook Hotel turns both into dread. The gliding shots that trail young Danny through the empty hallways were made with the Steadicam, operated by its inventor Garrett Brown, who did all of the film's Steadicam work. The hotel's interiors were built on sound stages at EMI Studios in England rather than found on location, so every corridor sits exactly where Kubrick wanted it. A father's slide into madness is the hook, but on repeat viewings it is the building itself, and the patterns in its carpets and rooms, that keep giving.
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A Clockwork Orange (1971)
8.2/10on IMDb
Released
The most abrasive film on the route, placed after The Shining so you come to it already used to Kubrick watching violence from a cool distance. Adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, it follows Alex, a Beethoven-loving gang leader in a near-future Britain, who is put through a state cure for his brutality, and it asks whether goodness forced on someone counts as goodness at all. Expect explicit sexual violence early on; the film never softens it. After reports of copycat violence and threats to his family, Kubrick himself withdrew it from British circulation in 1973, and it returned there only after his death.
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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
8.3/10on IMDb
Released
Save it until you have learned to trust Kubrick's patience, because this is where he asks for the most of it. There are fewer than 40 minutes of dialogue in the whole film, and the story of the monolith, the voyage and the calm, watchful computer HAL is told mostly through image, music and scale. Kubrick wrote it with Arthur C. Clarke, and watched at this point on the route it plays as the culmination of the precise compositions you have been tracking since The Killing. It brought Kubrick the only Oscar he ever won, for its visual effects. See it on the biggest screen you can find.
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Barry Lyndon (1975)
8.1/10on IMDb
Released
The slowest film here, which is why it comes after 2001 has trained your eye. Adapted from Thackeray's The Luck of Barry Lyndon, it follows an Irish opportunist climbing through 18th-century society, with Ryan O'Neal, then best known for screwball comedies, cast against type. Kubrick avoided electric light, shooting by daylight and, indoors, by candlelight through ultra-fast Zeiss lenses from a batch made mostly for NASA, so the interiors glow like period paintings. It runs over three hours and won four Oscars, cinematography among them. Give it an evening with no distractions; its irony and its sadness both build slowly.
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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
7.5/10on IMDb
Released
End where Kubrick did. He died six days after showing his final cut, and the film was released posthumously that July, so this is the last thing he made. Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler's novella Dream Story, it follows Tom Cruise's doctor through a long night of temptation after his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, admits to a fantasy about another man. After the whole route it plays like a summary of his obsessions: rituals of wealth and power, deadpan pacing and a camera that watches people fail to understand themselves. Expect explicit sexual content and a deliberately dreamlike, unhurried rhythm.
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