Room 237 (2012)

Reviewers can be prone to overthought or unchecked enthusiasm about their favourite films but the fanatics narrating this frustrating documentary, who share but barely elucidate their thoughts on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining including that it contains embedded messages in details such as the patterns of the Overlook Hotel corridor carpets or secret images photoshopped into the clouds in the sky, are on a level that in other circumstances might be able to be diagnosed and treated with neuroleptics.

★★☆☆☆

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Barry Lyndon (1975)

Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece based on a William Makepeace Thackerey novel tells of an Irish man's efforts to promote himself in English society and about the only detail slightly out of place in over three hours of tightly-controlled, painstakingly and sumptuously staged painterly period drama is Ryan O'Neal as Redmond Barry Lyndon - it is just a fraction hard to believe such a gormless, self-interested meathead is able to command any attention at all let alone the sympathy, ire, or outrage he arouses in the women and society figures around him.

★★★★★

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2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Based on an Arthur C Clarke story, Stanley Kubrick's unhurried sci-fi masterpiece and auto sensory meridian response tapping exercise starts with a group of apes in prehistoric times discovering a sheer, smooth monolith and ends millions of years later with an astronaut and a sinister sentient computer program called HAL 9000 on a mission to investigate a similar structure that has turned up in space.

★★★★★

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Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Based on a short story, Traumnovelle by 'the literary Sigmund Freud' Albert Schnitzler, Stanley Kubrick's last film is a slow-burn psychological suspense drama about adult sexual relations and monogamy, pondering whether a wife's erotic fantasy about an American Naval officer constitutes a betrayal of some kind against her husband.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS