Eyes Wide Shut

Part of The Loft Cinema’s summer series, 1999! BEST. MOVIE. YEAR. EVER.

Copies of the acclaimed book, Best. Movie. Year. Ever. How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Raftery, will be available for sale at the box-office during this series!

“A remarkably gripping, suggestive, and inventive piece of storytelling that, like Kubrick’s other work, is likely to grow in mystery and intensity over time.”- Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Stanley Kubrick took on the erotic thriller genre and polarized audiences one last time in this dreamlike and perverse meditation on a couple in psychosexual crisis. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman’s real-life status as a married couple (at the time) gives a unique frisson to what turned out to be Kubrick’s final film, completed just a week prior to his passing. Since the early ‘60s, Kubrick had wanted to film Arthur Schnitzler’s novella “Traumnovelle,” about a young doctor contemplating various forms of adultery and debauchery after discovering that his wife has entertained similar notions. Fully exploiting the story’s Kafkaesque elements of paranoia and dream/reality slippage, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut begins as Kidman’s confession of a long-held sexual fantasy drives Cruise into an obsessive and absurdist pursuit of extramarital thrills on the Christmas lit streets of New York; eventually things take a turn for the bizarre when the no-nonsense Manhattan doctor discovers that people he knows are involved in a dangerous society of secret sex clubs, leading to one of the most infamous masked orgies in movie history. Kubrick’s final, haunting exploration of humanity’s darkest recesses has, over the ensuing years, become the object of renewed interest and critical re-evaluation. (Dir. by Stanley Kubrick, 1999, USA/UK, 159 mins., Rated R)