looks like Kubrick, sounds like Kubrick - its a Kubrick!

Rating: Null/10 (19 March 2002)

If you're a member of the Short Attention Span Club and familiar if not inspired by Kubrick's work, you can probably take a pass on this one. If you're a died-in-the-wool member of the Carl Theodore Dreyer Circa 1950s League - and I am! - you can make it through anything. Any fans of "Ordet" out there?
Though overlong, I was mostly absorbed by "Eyes Wide Shut". Much of the audience seemed to hang on the promised epiphany of a Great Revelation which never came. It lacks the immediacy of Kubrick's best stuff, say "Paths of Glory" or "Clockwork", but there's still a lot that will keep it in the current repertoire. The Kubrick scholars will have plenty to analyze, while the malcontents among us will say, "Screw the numerologists. Its open to interpretation."
Cruise gives a very mannered performance. Kidman doesn't get out of the house much here. This movie is less about sex than it is about money, I think, and rather particular in its way but not fussy, which may be its saving grace.
The style is unmistakable: mirrors, windows, doors, opportunities, duplicity, shame - characteristics requiring the deft hand of Kubrick, though anyone who studied at a liberal arts college after, say, 1976 might wonder if he missed the shift in psychoanalytic theory from Early 20th Century to Feminist and Post-Feminist, of whom you can say what you want, but were among the only people bringing vitality to the field at the time, especially as it applies to filmmaking. I can't say if he did or didn't, which proves the success of both Kubrick and the Feminists.
Which is a long way of saying: if you're a Kubrick fan, see it - but then you were going to anyway.