’50s Kubrick • Criterion Channel Teaser

Now playing on the Criterion Channel! The first decade of Stanley Kubrick’s filmmaking career marked his swift ascent to international acclaim and laid the foundation for one of the most visionary and uncompromising creative runs in cinema history. Hypnotized by the possibilities of moviemaking as practiced by auteurs like Sergei Eisenstein and Max Ophuls, the young Kubrick honed his striking visual sensibility through his work as a street photographer, developing a dynamic, Weegee-like eye that he deployed in two independently produced features: the impressive antiwar allegory FEAR AND DESIRE, made when he was just twenty-five, and the punchy pulp noir KILLER’S KISS. He arrived in Hollywood as perhaps the greatest boy genius since Orson Welles, immediately producing a pair of masterpieces—the crackerjack caper THE KILLING and the searing World War I drama PATHS OF GLORY—that found him further sharpening both his famed stylistic precision and the themes (of the absurdity of war, violence, and human nature) that he would explore over the next four decades.