The Essentials: The Best Stanley Kubrick Film Ranked

8. “Full Metal Jacket” (1987)
A lean, vicious and highly memorable first half gives way to a less-focused, almost random-feeling second in Kubrick’s howl of disgust at the Vietnam War. And that is, on first glance, what makes “Full Metal Jacket” feel like second-string Kubrick – it seems to lack the formalist precision of his best films. And yet perhaps this roundabout journey is exactly as disjointed as a film about war should be. Private Pyle’s (Vincent D’Onofrio) spectacular, grotesque death is simply the opening salvo in a devolving narrative of dissolution, one that must go off the rails if it is to make a comment about war that so few war films do: that it is not just hell, it is goddamn stupid; it is not noble and tragic, but dehumanizing, inexcusable folly. As the meta-arc becomes clear and Joker (Matthew Modine) loses his fear, and therefore also his sense of himself while gaining The Stare of a man who’s seen combat, the story evolves into something basically unique in the pantheon of war films that, no matter how deeply held their anti-war agenda, cannot help but glorify and extol the sacrifices war encompasses. Here, the characters are all either psychotic, deluded, stupid or cowardly — young, uncomprehending men exploited into waging a war none of them understands and dying miserable, inglorious, unheralded deaths for their pains. Maybe Kubrick’s greatest comment on the horrors of conformity since “A Clockwork Orange,” “Full Metal Jacket” is also basically a singularity in its genre: a war film without one shred of glory in it.

7. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971)
Famously the subject of a self-imposed ban whereby Kubrick requested Warner Brothers withdraw it from distribution in the U.K. where it is set, “A Clockwork Orange” fast became one of the most controversial films ever made. It’s a reputation that somewhat eclipses the film itself, which, although bracingly uncompromising, feels among the least enduring of Kubrick’s (admittedly unparalleled) run of ’60s/’70s form. An adaptation of Anthony Burgess‘ already controversial, already brilliant novella, the film is set in a futuristic London where schoolboy Alex (Malcolm McDowell) and his “droogs” get their kicks from sex and violence (the film, later trimmed to an R, was an X on release, making its Best Picture nomination feel even more unlikely). And it is deeply queasy: In the first half of the movie alone, they beat up a vagrant, fight a rival gang, steal a car, cripple a burglary victim, rape his wife and murder an old woman. Furthermore, it displays an ambivalent stance on morality, indicting society at large, then pivoting to examine the idea of psychological conditioning, even on incontrovertible bad seeds such as Alex. It’s an audacious film, but it’s also ironically both one of Kubrick’s least subtle and most often wrongly co-opted. Partially as a result of the notoriety the director himself helped foster; partially for its instantly iconic aesthetic (which has dated by now); but largely for its orgiastic scenes of no-holds-barred symphonic violence, much of which is sexual in nature, the film is still the literal dorm-wall poster child for a kind of rebel-worshipping anti-authoritarianism that it does not actually endorse.

6. “Spartacus” (1960)
The business of ranking the films of Stanley Kubrick can only ever be a folly, and nowhere is that more obvious than when approaching his 1960 slave-revolt classic. On the one hand, it should be low on the list as it is probably the least Kubrickian film he made — and with good reason, because he was brought on as director-for-hire one week into shooting when producer and star Kirk Douglas felt that original helmer Anthony Mann was overwhelmed by the scale of the project. On the other hand, “Spartacus” is brilliant, a superb old-school, classical Hollywood epic (read: grand hokum, if you’re so inclined) and, along with William Wyler‘s “Ben-Hur,” probably the greatest-ever example of the the swords-and-sandals genre. Boasting a clutch of terrific performances from Douglas, Laurence Olivier and an Oscar-winning Peter Ustinov, as well as a Tony Curtis turn rendered charmingly incongruous because of his flat Bronx vowels, Kubrick himself may not have felt much ownership over the finished film, but it’s impossible to imagine it would have had the same lasting status without his ever-meticulous, sometimes fractious input. Scripted by Dalton Trumbo (whose onscreen credit was insisted upon by Douglas, thereby heralding the beginning of the end of the Hollywood blacklist), it tells the based-in-truth story of the famous Roman slave rebellion, and if it doesn’t have the crystalline complexity that characterizes Kubrick elsewhere, it does have battle scenes, bisexuality and the broad Hollywood heroics of “I’m Spartacus!”

5. “Barry Lyndon” (1975)
Given a mixed reception at the time, “Barry Lyndon” remains one of Kubrick’s most divisive films: to some a indulgent bore, to others his greatest masterpiece. We’re torn ourselves, but most of us lean closer to the second position than the first. Based on “The Luck Of Barry Lyndon” by “Vanity Fair” author William Makepeace Thackeray, it’s a period epic that filled the gap left by his never-made “Napoleon” movie (which Cary Fukunaga will soon tackle as a miniseries), set during the same sort of period but coming from a very different perspective. Ryan O’Neal is the unlikely choice as the title character, a penniless Irishman whose travels take him into the British army, then the Prussian army, then as a spy, and then an idle trophy husband. It’s a film of stately beauty, of Gainsborough-like landscapes and Hogarth-like interiors and faces, famously filmed with a bare minimum of natural light by Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott (who won the Oscar, quite rightly), and its formal qualities can come across as rigid and dusty to those not quite attuned to its peculiar wavelength. But those same elements can also be read as a perfect evocation of its period, with its slow rhythms; surprisingly sly, understated humor; and static frames immersing you in late 18th-century society with almost unparalleled immediacy and authenticity. It’s perhaps one to save for after you’re familiar with the director’s other work, but approached in the right frame of mind, it can reward you richly in almost every sumptuous frame.

4. “Paths Of Glory” (1957)
It’s very possible that there are those for whom the words “Kubrick” and “war film” will only return the more recent and better-known answer “Full Metal Jacket.” If that’s you, you have a major treat in store as Kubrick’s fourth film, a black-and-white 1957 title set during World War I, is also one of his best. It stars a brilliant, conflicted Kirk Douglas (Kubrick was right to somewhat disdain by comparison his flatter, more obviously heroic turn as Spartacus three years later) as Colonel Dax, forced to lead a suicidal mission to take a nearby hill by the ambitious General Mireau (George Macready, in a hall-of-fame asshole performance). When the mission fails, Mireau and his superior (played with careless cunning by Adolphe Menjou) court-martial three innocent men, and Dax, who was previously a lawyer, takes on the cause of defending them, but the entrenched hierarchies of the military system prove impossible to defeat. It’s a knotted, twisted film made as much of chagrin as celluloid as Dax, the prototypical good soldier, is forced into ever more constricting moral positions, and the bite of its satire — such as a scene during a lavish ball at which Dax must plead for the innocent men’s lives over cigars and brandy — is deep and poisonous. And again Kubrick, here with DP Georg Krause, delivers some extraordinary shotmaking, notably a famous long take through the trenches, that gives us one of the best-ever evocations of the grim, class-riven conditions of the First World War frontlines.