A touching story of one man's love for a steady-cam

Rating: 4/10 (22 February 2005)

As a lesson in graceful film-making, it's a must. As an effective horror movie, it's a disaster. Stanley Kubrick shows his technical flair with the newly available steady-cam, but you have to keep asking, "How is this making the film scary?" For a much better example of how to create suspense, see "Halloween" made with a fraction of the budget and ten times the imagination. John Carpenter's camera stalks the characters like an extra character in the film. Kubrick's camera floats. It's pretty. But it's not scary.
Jack Nicholson gives a bravura performance, unfortunately it belongs in a different film. He's supposed to be a man having a breakdown, but he looks deranged from frame 1. Perhaps he thought he was still in Cuckoo's Nest.
The film has moments of course, you'd expect nothing less from a director of this calibre, but they are few and far between in a ridiculously self-important and overlong film.