A 20 year old movie that still strikes true. Nearly perfect.

Rating: 9/10 (26 January 1999)

Perhaps the most famous set of false eyelashes in film history. Stanley Kubrick's blackest of comedies, he had the good sense to omit the last chapter of Anthony Burgess' book, leaving the edge on Burgess' savage attack on modern society.
Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is the leader of a small gang of hoodlums who repeatedly rob, rape, and steal their way across an unnamed and futuristic state. When a robbery culminates in murder, Alex's gang betray him to the police. He is found guilty, and sent to prison. There he volunteers for a mind-washing program in order to be released. Once released he is set upon by his former mates and victims. But the mind-washing has rendered him not just pliable, but helpless.
Filled with beautiful set-piece scenes, the violence of the film, while not terribly explicit by today's standards, is still shocking. The soundtrack by Walter (later Wendy) Carlos is especially effective at making the violence especially repugnant. Part what drives this reaction is that Alex, while a thoroughly corrupt person, becomes even more repugnant once deprived of his own will. His love of Beethoven is crushed and the one redeeming facet of this thoroughly unlikable person is removed.
But the film also succeeds in getting us to root for Alex. Better a willful evil than a slavish good. In the end we cheer his minor triumph. Free will exposes us to evil, but lack of it is not worth the price.