Stanley Kubrick’s films ranked – from worst to best

Graeme Ross examines the great director’s relatively short but spectacularly varied filmography

Stanley Kubrick, despite making just 13 full-length films in a near 50-year career, excelled in so many genres: horror, film noir, comedy of the pitch-black type, historical romance, war and more.

It’s just a shame he couldn’t rub along better with Marlon Brando on One-Eyed Jacks (1961) from which he was fired, just to see what he would have made of a western.

Painstakingly meticulous to the nth degree, and a true auteur, Kubrick had a well deserved reputation as a perfectionist, insisting on multiple takes, selecting the ideal music to illustrate scenes and building expansive sets while enjoying a huge degree of artistic freedom like few directors before or since.

Controversy was no stranger to Kubrick – he took on the “unfilmable novel” (Lolita) and brought Anthony Burgess’s dystopian nightmare A Clockwork Orange to the screen and was condemned for its explicit violence, but he rarely compromised.

Kubrick’s 13 films make for a challenging, thought-provoking body of work that stands in comparison with any of the giants of cinema, and he was responsible for so many iconic images – think of the aerial tracking shots over no-mans land in Paths of Glory, Major Kong riding the nuclear bomb in Dr Strangelove, the space station docking in Space Odyssey to the strains of “The Blue Danube”, and so many more.

Here are Stanley Kubrick’s 13 films ranked. Feel free to disagree, I’m sure Stanley would.

13. Fear and Desire (1953)

Kubrick suppressed Fear and Desire’s availability for decades, and given his well documented disdain for his first full-length feature, you would be forgiven for thinking that any trailer for Fear and Desire should have the rider “For Kubrick completists and cinephiles only”.

However, this allegorical anti-war movie following four soldiers caught behind enemy lines has more going for it than its reputation would suggest.

As you would expect given Kubrick’s apprenticeship as a photojournalist, the cinematography is admirable, and 24-year-old Kubrick’s editing crisp and clean.

Yes, the acting is wooden and the script dull, however the film’s theme of best laid plans gone awry through human frailty was one that Kubrick would revisit throughout his career, and as a portent of what was to come, Fear and Desire is well worth an hour of your time.

Kubrick’s second feature was another shoestring-budget affair, but he stepped up a couple of divisions for this stylish film noir about a boxer involved with a nightclub dancer menaced by her lecherous boss.

New Yorker Kubrick made good use of authentic, shadow-filled Manhattan locations for his first outing in dark city which has many classic noir tropes – the film is told in flashback by a world weary narrator, there’s love, deception, murder and revenge, and a striking denouement as hero and villain battle it out in a warehouse filled with mannequins.

Kubrick was learning fast and Killer’s Kiss gave notice of a burgeoning talent and it wouldn’t be long before the major studios came calling.

11. Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

An affluent doctor is tortured by thoughts that his wife had contemplated cheating on him.

As a result he becomes embroiled in a secret sexual society, placing both himself and his wife in grave danger. Kubrick’s final film came 12 years after his previous one, Full Metal Jacket, and was released posthumously, the director having died shortly after he completed his final cut.

I always wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them

Private Joker in ‘Full Metal Jacket’

Starring then husband and wife Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Eyes Wide Shut was impossibly hyped as art house porn featuring Hollywood’s golden couple and as the master’s final masterpiece.

It’s neither of course, merely a fairly interesting erotic drama that crawls at a snail’s pace at times, even by Kubrick’s standards.

Having said that, if exposure to Kubrick’s oeuvre has told us anything as movie lovers, it is that many of his films were initially undervalued and misinterpreted, with their true quality only becoming apparent years after their release.

Perhaps Eyes Wide Shut will follow that trait.

10. Lolita (1962)

A case of wrong time, wrong place for Kubrick who was constrained both by the censors and by filming in England, where he had moved with his family the previous year, his adaption of Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous novel about a middle-aged professor’s infatuation with a sexually precocious adolescent girl.

Kubrick later claimed if he had known beforehand how severe the censorship restrictions would be, he wouldn’t have made Lolita, but Nabokov revealed that Kubrick had incorporated several things into the film that he wished he had thought of for the novel.

James Mason gives a fearless performance as Humbert Humbert and Shelley Winters is suitably monstrous as Lolita’s mother, while the improvisational skills of Peter Sellers in the role of Clare Quilty were allowed full rein.

Sue Lyon as Lolita was deemed to be a weak link although her performance did win her a Golden Globe for most promising newcomer.

The screenplay was credited to Nabokov and he received an Oscar nod for it, but it is widely accepted that Kubrick and long-term collaborator James Harris rewrote much of it.

Some critics also felt that the film was weakened by Kubrick’s decision to alter the chronology of the novel, beginning the film with the climax of the book when Humbert shoots Quilty, making him a murderer before the audience know his feelings for Lolita.

No Kubrick film can be considered even close to a failure, but the overriding feeling on Lolita is one of a missed opportunity.

9. Spartacus (1960)

Kirk Douglas as the titular Roman slave in Spartacus (Rex)

As mainstream as Kubrick ever got, Spartacus is the archetypal Hollywood sword and sandals blockbuster and the least Kubrick-like movie in his oeuvre, partially because of producer/star Kirk Douglas’s input and also because Kubrick felt hamstrung by Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay which he didn’t much care for.

Star and director didn’t always see eye to eye either.

Douglas, exasperated by Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail, reckoned that he spent longer making Spartacus than the slaves’ rebellion lasted.

Spartacus remains a great spectacle however, if a bit wordy, and won four Oscars, none of them for Kubrick.

Despite its success at the box office and critical praise, the experience of working on Spartacus soured Kubrick’s feelings about Hollywood and precipitated his move to England in 1961 where he could exercise much greater artistic control and where he lived and worked for the rest of his life.

8. Full Metal Jacket (1987)

Kubrick’s Vietnam movie is a visceral experience which follows a group of raw Marine volunteers from boot camp to action in the Tet Offensive.

Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!

President Muffley in ‘Dr Strangelove’

Kubrick explores the dehumanising effect that not just combat but the brutal training regime under a profane, bullying instructor has on the recruits.

Coming after a succession of highly regarded Vietnam movies, The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1987), Full Metal Jacket perhaps suffered by comparison.

Critics uniformly praised the first half of the film, but felt the second half, with Kubrick replicating Vietnam in London’s Docklands, was unstructured and a little flat.

But watching the film now, although I am still blown away by the ferocity of the first half and R Lee Emery’s unforgettable performance, it is the black humour of the second act: “I always wanted to meet interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture... and kill them,” Private Joker tells a television crew.

Trademark Kubrick set-pieces such as the climactic battle with a girl sniper systematically slaughtering the Marines and Joker having to kill the wounded girl linger just as long in the memory.

7. A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Malcolm McDowell as Alex, leader of the Droogs in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Moviestore Collection/Rex/Shutterstock) (Moviestore Collection/REX Shutterstock)

From the Burgess novel, Kubrick’s scathing satire set in a dystopian society in the not so distant future predictably caused controversy on release and continued to do so for many years afterwards, with one reviewer accusing Kubrick of creating “intellectual pornography”.

Disturbed by reports that the stylised violence in the film had provoked copycat crimes, Kubrick withdrew the film in Britain in 1973 and it wasn’t made available again until 2000, a year after Kubrick’s death.

Even now, A Clockwork Orange still divides opinions in an era when audiences have long been conditioned to extreme violence on film, but hasn’t lost the power to shock and raises just as many questions as answers about morality, free will and authority.

6. Barry Lyndon (1975)

Boasting sumptuous production values, this exquisitely mounted, leisurely paced adaption of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel about the rise and fall of an 18th-century Irish rogue hero received middling reviews when released, but still won four Academy Awards, including not surprisingly, the costume, cinematography and art direction categories; for Barry Lyndon is undoubtedly one of the most stunningly beautiful pictures ever made.

Kubrick shot all but a few scenes by natural light and candlelight, investing the film with the authentic look of the period and evoking the works of Hogarth and Gainsborough – exactly the look that Kubrick desired.

Like other films in the Kubrick canon that originally bypassed the critics, Barry Lyndon is now recognised for its true worth.

Invest three hours of your life in viewing Barry Lyndon and you will be bountifully rewarded.

5. The Killing (1956)

A huge leap forward from Kubrick’s first two ultra-low budget independent features Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss, The Killing has shades of The Asphalt Jungle (1950), not least in the casting of Sterling Hayden as the career criminal who recruits a team of specialists for one last racecourse heist.

The caper goes to plan perfectly but the aftermath gradually and inexorably unravels in spectacular and bloody fashion.

Don’t let the clichéd Dragnet-style narration or the B movie status put you off – this is top notch film noir with a lean, mean approach that proved hugely influential in the years to come, serving as the blueprint for Reservoir Dogs (1992).

Featuring a gallery of dark city’s best character actors and the hardest of hard-boiled scripts from pulp novelist Jim Thompson, The Killing was released towards the end of the classic noir period, and both paid tribute to the genre and gave notice that a new style of movie-making was imminent.

Kubrick used innovative flashback sequences to show the buildup to the heist from the protagonists’ perspectives and called on his photographer’s background for some innovative handheld shots, while demonstrating his emerging visual style with some dizzying camera angles.

There’s not a wasted second in a movie that put Kubrick on the map.

4. The Shining (1980)

Shelley Duvall is terrorised in ‘The Shining’ (Rex) (Rex Features)

Author Stephen King, upset at the wholesale changes made by the director, hated Kubrick’s adaption of his celebrated and terrifying novel.

However, The Shining still works as a chilling horror movie with Kubrick putting his own indelible stamp on proceedings – the jaw-dropping tracking shot of the child on his tricycle, the shocking image of torrents of blood flowing from an elevator.

Kubrick was also happy to give his actors full latitude to improvise and Jack Nicholson is in full scenery chewing mode, his descent into madness making for mesmerising viewing.

Although The Shining may be a film about ghosts, it’s not a ghost story – the real horror here is the madness within Nicholson’s character that lies dormant until it finds its conduit through the deserted and isolated hotel, which may or may not be haunted.

Kubrick’s other less welcome actors’ trope – his obsessive perfectionism – resulted in Scatman Crothers repeating a take 160 times and left Shelley Duvall (a mere 127 takes for one scene) scarred by her experience of working with him.

On its release the critics didn’t care too much for The Shining or Kubrick’s direction either, viewing Kubrick’s deliberate pace as ponderous and complaining about the lack of cheap thrills normally found in “traditional” horror movies.

It has long since been re-evaluated however, and The Shining’s reputation as not just a great horror movie, but a great Kubrick film, is well deserved.

3. Paths of Glory (1957)

There are many Kubrick aficionados who cite Paths of Glory as his greatest film.

It is certainly his first masterpiece and may well be the greatest anti-war film ever made, with its shattering portrayal of the slaughter in the trenches of the First World War and the jockeying for promotions of the self-serving army generals who view the men on the frontline as mere cannon fodder in their own quest for advancement.

Winston Churchill considered Paths of Glory to have been the most realistic depiction of trench warfare, but the film’s themes could have been set to any war and told from the perspective of any nation.

However, Humphrey Cobb’s source novel depicted events in the French military and as such, the film was banned in France for almost 20 years.

Stunningly conceived and executed, Paths of Glory still has the capacity to elicit so many differing emotions – anger, pity, shame, revulsion – from the viewer as the insanity and futility of war is laid bare in typical unflinching Kubrick style.

2. Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

Kubrick is at his most relentlessly cynical with this bitterly hilarious satire on the twisted logic of having the so-called ultimate deterrent in the first place.

Perhaps only Kubrick would dare make a film about nuclear Armageddon as the Cold War was intensifying and so soon after the Cuban Missile Crisis, as he speculates on the consequences of the wrong person with their finger on the trigger.

With fantastic sets courtesy of Ken Adams, outstanding black and white cinematography, a devastating script with lines quoted ad infinitum, (“Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”) and a uniformly brilliant cast, allied to Kubrick’s fearless approach throughout, climaxing in the montage of mushroom clouds to the strains of “We’ll Meet Again”, Dr Strangelove is peak Kubrick, finding humour in the most chilling of subject matters.

If anything, it has improved with age and remains as fresh and as relevant today as when it was made.

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Keir Dullea in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (Warner Brothers)

A milestone film that places space exploration in the context of humankind’s evolution, whilst contemplating a higher power and the meaning of life in a future where computers call the shots; rarely has a film provoked so much analysis and debate, which was probably Kubrick’s intention from the outset.

What, for example, is the head-scratching ending all about, and what is the true purpose of the mysterious black monolith that pops up on Earth, then the Moon and finally in outer space as the spaceship heads for Jup

These conundrums all add to the mystery and aura of a film in which Kubrick’s legendary attention to detail with regards to the sets stretched to importing just the right type of sand and washing and painting it to accurately portray the moon’s surface.

The Oscar-winning special effects still impress today in an era of soulless CGI technology, and then there is the iconic use of classical pieces “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and “The Blue Danube” to illustrate some of the many stunning set-pieces in the film.

Even 50 years on, A Space Odyssey is still the sci-fi movie against which all others must be measured and demands and rewards repeated viewings, preferably on the big screen, in order to appreciate the magnitude of a visual and aural feast of all that is great about the cinema.