In the following essay, Collins investigates Kubrick's use of image and metaphor in his films.

In the following essay, Miers asserts that “to understand Kubrick's achievement one must attempt a reading of the mass-market book on which it is based.”

In the following essay, Lake reflects on Kubrick's life and career.

Stanley Kubrick's major films reveal his search for an unrestricted form through which he can communicate with his audience without coercing them into mistaking his particular structures for reality. Increasingly, he has come to use the popular arts as his central means for expressing that search. He does this by showing us the contradictory meanings and implications of the popular arts, their escapist as well as their life-asserting implications, the ways in which they reveal the contemporary tenden...

Some directors possess an instantly recognisable signature; others, merely a consistency of style and treatment; but the worrying thing about Stanley Kubrick was the way he once made excellent films which seemed to reveal so little of their director's personality that they might almost have come out of a vacuum. While admiring The Killing and, even more, Paths of Glory, one couldn't help wondering whether Kubrick might not turn out after all as simply a brilliant packager of artistically viabl...

From the beginning, most American filmmakers have been idiot-savants: technically brilliant but unintelligent about life. (p. 439) Although Stanley Kubrick began his career within [this] artistic tradition …, he soon displayed signs of rejection. After two obviously apprentice films …, Kubrick made a tightly plotted action movie that nevertheless subverts some of the genre's basic assumptions. So far from showing a meticulously planned heist as the expression of human adroitness, The Ki...

Kubrick films are very bloody and cruel. For savage assault upon the viewer's nerves and hopes, there is little in modern film to match the protracted death-march in Paths of Glory, and the Kubrick canon includes also Lolita, with its murder shown lovingly and lengthily not once but twice; the explosive massacre in The Killing; the Spartacus bloodbath; and the unforgettable "thump" of the dying general's nose hitting the floor in Fear and Desire. This virtually sadistic treatment...

It used to be idle—or scholarly—to compare films to the novels from which they were taken; now, one can scarcely avoid it. The index to the change is the difference between Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) or Paths of Glory (1957) and his Lolita (1962). The earlier films were real films; Lolita is in the current style of the un-film. The only truly cinematic effect I noticed was a cut from somebody's face to a face in a horror movie at a drive-in, a cut so drastic I cannot ev...

One might often disagree with Kubrick's ideas, at times even find them a bit silly, but none of that detracts from the fact that Kubrick puts together picture shows which are entertaining, aesthetically pleasing, and provoking, all at the same time. Kubrick is, among other things, a true screen poet. He knows how to use visual images to communicate. Movies should probably never communicate anything with words that could be communicated with a picture, and Kubrick's rarely do. Kubrick character...