It was 45 years ago this weekend that Stanley Kubrick gave us 2001: A Space Odyssey, a vision of the future that still beckons, even if the title is out of date. Something similar can be said about the extraordinary artist who made the masterpiece. History tells us that Kubrick died in 1999 at the age of 70, but our current pop culture tells us that his singular genius remains relevant and challenging to those who make movies, those who consume movies, and those who write about movies for a living. We see homages to The Shining in NBC’s new horror drama Hannibal and to Dr. Strangelove in JJ Abrams’ forthcoming sci-fi adventure Star Trek Into Darkness. We see his influence on an array of filmmakers, including Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle, who tells EW that his 1996 dark comedy Trainspotting about desperate, druggy British droogs was an attempt “to make a more accessible version of A Clockwork Orange.” Steven Spielberg — who has already expressed his intense Kubrickianism by taking on one of Kubrick’s legendary unmade/abandoned projects, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) — recently announced his intention to raise up another Kubrick orphan by producing a TV mini-series based on Kubrick’s screenplay about the life and times of Napoleon. “Stanley Kubrick,” a major exhibition exploring the filmmaker’s life and career, is currently enjoying a long, popular run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In death as he did in life, Stanley Kubrick abides. For better…

And weirder. Now in select theaters (and slowly expanding nationwide): Room 237, an engrossing documentary about the richly odd legacy inspired by a horror movie now considered an all-timer, but which left critics more cold than chilled upon its release 33 years ago. Did you know that Stanley Kubrick shot The Shining to make a secret statement about the Holocaust? To cryptically confess his participation in a NASA conspiracy to produce fake film footage of the first moon landing? To slyly criticize American consumerism and superficial pop culture? But he did! The signs and symbols are there! It’s all true… according to a subculture of armchair semioticians and Kubrick aficionados who insist the cabin fever creepshow about a really bad husband, father, and writer driven to be worse by a haunted hotel is dense with hidden narratives. “The Shining presents itself like puzzle to be solved, albeit a puzzle missing a piece or two,” says Room 237 director Rodney Ascher. “It lodges in your mind like a pebble in your shoe and invites inquiry and obsession.”

Which is something you can say about almost any movie made by Kubrick, who specialized in thematically rich, intricately constructed, fascinating-frustrating elliptical cinema.  READ FULL STORY »