Review: "Eyes Wide Shut" and the dying dream of 20th-century cinema

Movie of the Week #19 examines a controversial classic at 25

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The 159 minutes of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut slowly cover a very simple character arc in gloriously deliberate detail: A deeply repressed bourgeois man is forced to confront that he is, in fact, human, and that he therefore has human urges and emotions. Within its languid, dream-like pace, the film finds such profundity in this idea. Perhaps there is even something metatextual here; for a director who was so often (if perhaps unfairly) accused of being cold, his films sometimes described as seeming like an alien examining humanity, Eyes Wide Shut is a moment when Kubrick connects with the messiness of humanity very intensely.