The final work of legendary director Stanley Kubrick.

Rating: 8/10 (10 November 2010)

Stanley Kubrick's detractors used his showmanship as a criticism of his films, claiming that they were only simple stories writ portentously and pompously large, all form and no substance. And these detractors were never so merciless - or so numerous - as they were with his final film, Eyes Wide Shut, which was released posthumously in the summer of 1998. The incentive came fast and furious. The film was too slow. Its vision of New York was hopelessly out of touch. It was misogynist. It was ugly. Its notion of sexuality was old-fashioned. It was unfinished. The rumours were dished out to a public that finally had no use for this most intimate and nakedly emotional of Kubrick's films. Eyes Wide Shut is the story of a young Manhattan doctor (Tom Cruise) who uses his wife's (Nicole Kidman) spontaneous confession of past unrequited desire for another man as license to explore his own desires, only to encounter an endless series of prohibitions and frustrations. For those who went to Kubrick's film with their eyes wide open, it is one of his greatest films, composed and enacted in dream logic, set in the ravishing tones of fin-de-siecle Viennese painting. Kubrick uses his two dedicated superstars to dig deep into uncomfortable emotional issues. He may have lived in England for the last 35 years of his life, and he may have been a towering artist, but Kubrick was also the last of the great American showmen. He knew how to deliver a total experience. Like most of his work, Eyes Wide Shut will make the shift to classic status.