Kubrick by Kubrick

Stanley Kubrick gave very few interviews across his long career and none of them were filmed. The French critic Michel Ciment spoke with him four times: around the releases of A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. Those audio recordings were kept, and the documentary is built entirely on them. Grégory Monro puts Kubrick's voice at the center and arranges archive material around it: set footage, home movies, passages from the films, and old interviews with people who worked with him. Kirk Douglas, Malcolm McDowell and James Mason appear in archive. The film's value comes not from any new reading but from Kubrick explaining his own work in his own words. It runs seventy minutes and came out in 2020. Who it's for: Anyone interested in Kubrick's cinema, director interviews, and archive-based film documentary. Who it's not for: There is little new information and the film does not enter the arguments about Kubrick. Seventy minutes is short for this career.