The Shining

It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror. Read full review

The unhurried pace, extended dialogue scenes and those sudden, sinister inter-titles ("One Month Later", "4pm") contribute to the insidious unease. Nicholson's performance as the abusive father who is tipped over the edge is a thrillingly scabrous, black-comic turn, and the final shot of his face in daylight is a masterstroke...Deeply scary and strange. Read full review

A masterpiece. Read full review

With remarkable visual panache and a keen sense of irony, Stanley Kubrick rehabilitates Stephen King's trashy, terrifying novel. Not a horror film in any traditional sense, but a perversely comic, occasionally frightening melodrama of intrafamilial rage, THE SHINING retains the Oedipal structure of King's narrative while running rings around its pulpy sensibility. Read full review

The Shining buzzes madness and malevolence from every frame. Read full review

Stanley Kubrick hungers for the ultimate. In The Shining, he has gone after the ultimate horror movie, something that will make "The Exorcist" look like "Abbott and Costello Meet Beelzebub." The result is the first epic horror film, a movie that is to other horror movies what his "2001: A Space Odyssey" was to other space movies. [26 May 1980, p.96]

But there is no way, within the film, to be sure with any confidence exactly what happens, or precisely how, or really why. Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease. Read full review

Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions ...and also makes you jump. Read full review

Who would have ever thought to pair up Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King? But weird as it sounds, this creepy thriller works. Read full review

The Shining is terrifying for what it doesn’t do. Read full review

Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday." Read full review

For a supposed mainstream movie, Kubrick’s The Shining isn’t very audience friendly. Half the time you have to guess what the hell is going on, and if you're not familiar with Kubrick's narrative style you’ll be completely lost. Read full review

Despite its deliberate pacing, it moves quickly, in large part because of the extraordinary way that Kubrick builds and deepens the sense of dread. Even seemingly normal and innocent moments - such as Danny tooling around the corridors of the hotel on his Big Wheel (with the sound of the wheels echoing on hard wood and muffled on carpet) - are overshadowed by an encroaching sense of the ominous. Technically, The Shining may be one of the most perfect motion pictures I have seen. It's too bad that the same level of excellence doesn't extend to the performances and screenplay. The Shining is well worth experiencing, but it does not rank as a member of Kubrick's top echelon of cinematic achievements. Read full review

When you sit down to The Shining, you sit down with normal expectations of being diverted, perhaps even being gripped, but not being undermined. But the film undermines you in powerful, inchoate ways. It's a horror story even for people who don't like horror stories - maybe especially for them. [14 Jun 1980, p.1]

Stephen King reportedly loathed the liberties Kubrick and co-writer Diane Johnson took with his story, but King's ur-villain, the emasculated husband from hell, has never been more clearly presented on-screen. Read full review

THE SHINING, billed as a "masterpiece of modern horror," fails in one vital regard: it isn't very scary... Kubrick is master of visual images, and many of the scenes display his brilliance. But much of the suspense ends in anti-climax, and Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall seem over-extended in trying to maintain the terror. [28 June 1980]