In the matter of sex, which is the matter of the film, Kubrick tinctures heavily with salaciousness, the particular salaciousness of aging film directors who have the power to display women as they like. For instance, at the lavish Christmas party early in the picture, Doctor Bill is summoned by his host to attend a young woman whom the host has been screwing upstairs but who took a hard drug and is blotto. Any reasonably human person, like the host, would have covered her prone naked body, but Kubrick insists on her nakedness. This, he might have argued, was brutal candor, but it looks like brutal voyeurism. So this is where the Kubrick career ends, with this technically accomplished, inadequately conceived work.
Retrospect is inevitable.
Of course, Kubrick had more money for that fourth feature, but it was spent by a very different director from the man who had made the third. He had suddenly become a sophisticated and excitingly fluent film-maker. Spartacus was insufficiently appreciated because it is a costume spectacle, but it was directed with muscular imagination. Then came some work on Brando's One-Eyed Jacks, which Kubrick quit because, he said at our lunch, Brando was absolutely insane. Then Lolita, beautiful, whose only fault is that it isn't really the novel.