There's nothing else like watching a Kubrick film.

Rating: 9/10 (17 July 1999)

This was my first and last time seeing a Stanley Kubrick film in a theatre -- and that's a shame. A lot of Tom & Nicole fans probably won't know quite what to make of this movie. But Cruise & Kidman, to paraphrase Chris Isaak, did a good, good thing by exposing Kubrick's work to a lot of people who might otherwise never have seen it.
I was amused to read that some critics didn't think it was "sexy" enough, which misses the point completely. What makes sex sexy is intimacy, which almost all the characters in the movie are lacking. The tender scenes with the prostitute and (late in the film) with his wife are more compelling than any of the "sexy" scenes in the movie.
I hope that someday we'll able to see it as Kubrick originally intended - without the computerized revelers in the orgy scenes. Cruise's character is on a voyeuristic journey for an hour and a half, only to have digital bodies inserted in front of what he really wanted to see. His breakdown in front of his wife afterward would have been much more compelling had we seen the horrors that he did. Again, simulated violence is more palatable to the MPAA than simulated sex is. This is an adult film for adults, and their pressure to change Kubrick's film protects no one.