The Shining

The horror fan who climbs into his movie seat looking for an experience as intense as a roller-coaster ride will be more teased than satisfied. The director of "Lolita," "Dr. Strangelove" and "Clockwork Orange" is simply working with less interesting material: The Shining is a slender, barely believable tale being asked to carry a lot of style and weight. [13 June 1980, p.19]

Disappointing... Jack Nicholson parodies himself while Kubrick fails to provide any thrills. [11 July 1980, p.8]

There are moments so visually stunning only a Kubrick could pull them off, yet the film is too grandiose to be the jolter that horror pictures are expected to be. Both those expecting significance from Kubrick and those merely looking for a good scare may be equally disappointed. Read full review

Though taken from a pulp best-seller, by Stephen King, the movie isn't the scary fun one might hope for from a virtuoso technician like Kubrick. It has a promising opening sequence, and there is some spectacular use of the Steadicam, but Kubrick isn't interested in the people on the screen as individuals. They are his archetypes, and he's using them to make a metaphysical statement about the timelessness of evil. He's telling us that man is a murderer through eternity. Kubrick's involvement in technology distances us from his meaning, though, and while we're watching the film it just doesn't seem to make sense.

It is a daring thing the director has done, this bleaching out of all the cheap thrills, this dashing of all the hopes one brings to what is, after all, advertised as "a masterpiece of modern horror." Certainly he has asked much of Nicholson, who must sustain attention in a hugely unsympathetic role, and who responds with a brilliantly crazed performance. Read full review

The opening scene of The Shining is along a narrow mountain road while the “Dies Irae” plays ominously on the soundtrack. The camera veers out away from the car toward the horizon as if to bear down on something significant… and then comes back to the car. The movement is a sort of portent for the direction of the movie, which takes two and a half hours to go nowhere. Read full review

The crazier Nicholson gets, the more idiotic he looks. Shelley Duvall transforms the warm sympathetic wife of the book into a simpering, semi-retarded hysteric. Read full review

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery--with its compulsive symmetry and brightness--is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense. Read full review