| 100 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Eyes Wide Shut still towers above most of the movies out there, immersing the viewer in a web of emotional complexity, at once raw and personal and, at times, theatrically overcooked.
|
| 100 |
USA Today
A precisely modulated and mostly mesmerizing 2¾-hour suspense movie, in part because it's one of the most bravely disturbing screen works ever attempted about thoughts withheld by even the most devoted marriage partners and the ramifications of voicing them.
|
| 100 |
Film.com
As the late Stanley Kubrick's swansong, it fills the bill magnificently.
|
| 100 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.
|
| 100 |
Chicago Tribune
A spellbinder: provocatively conceived, gorgeously shot and masterfully executed.
|
| 90 |
Film.com
A movie with the power and quality of dreams, where reality merges into symbolism and oddly juxtaposed elements crystallize into a single, electrifying whole.
|
| 90 |
Variety
A riveting, thematically probing, richly atmospheric and just occasionally troublesome work, a deeply inquisitive consideration of the extent of trust and mutual knowledge possible between a man and a woman.
|
| 90 |
The New York Times
Kubrick left one more brilliantly provocative tour de force as his epitaph.
|
| 90 |
Film.com
It's Kubrick, for sure, and in often mesmerizing form.
|
| 88 |
ReelViews
In terms of power and effect, Eyes Wide Shut approaches (but does not surpass) Kubrick's vintage work - it is thought-provoking and unsettling.
|
| 88 |
Chicago Sun-Times
The reconciliation at the end of the film is the one scene that doesn't work; a film that intrigues us because of its loose ends shouldn't try to tidy up.
|
| 80 |
TV Guide
While both the novel and the film are weighted in favor of Bill's (Cruise) character, it's Kidman who gives the film's standout performance.
|
| 80 |
Los Angeles Times
Makes its strongest impression not with dialogue but with virtuoso visual work…. when you work with Kubrick, it's always the director, never the actors, who is the real star. That can lead a film up or down or, as it does here, in both directions at the same time. [16 July 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]
|
| 80 |
Chicago Reader
This is 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.
|
| 80 |
Newsweek
Jack Kroll
If some nagging sense of anachronism, a bit too much Freudian Vienna in his postmodern New York, prevents Eyes Wide Shut from being at the top of his list, Kubrick's 13th and last film is his most humane.
|
| 80 |
Washington Post
It's painstakingly paced, but it's also entrancing.
|
| 78 |
Austin Chronicle
These scenes of debauchery and lust that make up the film's centerpiece are among some of the most powerful and disturbing ever put to film.
|
| 75 |
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Whatever it is, it's totally Kubrickian: Its scenes have both an edge and an extraordinary visual perfection that could come from no other filmmaker.
|
| 75 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Totally absorbing even when it, too, strays.
|
| 75 |
Christian Science Monitor
Brilliantly filmed in his usual transfixing style, Kubrick's last movie pleads for alertness to the temptations that assail human nature from within and without.
|
| 75 |
New York Daily News
Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut doesn't rank among Kubrick's best work.
|
| 70 |
TNT RoughCut
It's a mind-blowing game, and all that nonsense about this being an erotic thriller was merely part of Kubrick's game.
|
| 63 |
San Francisco Examiner
Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.
|
| 63 |
New York Post
Rod Dreher
It's shocking only in its banality, impotence and utter lack of heat.
|
| 60 |
LA Weekly
It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.
|
| 50 |
Dallas Observer
Hal Hinson
It is, as his films usually are, dense, complex, and challenging. It is also, sad to say, ponderous, often inscrutable, and ultimately not much fun.
|
| 50 |
New York Post
Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's Hindenberg.
|
| 50 |
Entertainment Weekly
The director's famously over-deliberate, pause-laden style verges, for the first time, on amateurville, and that gives us too much time to linger on the movie's more bizarre details.
|
| 40 |
Village Voice
Feels like a rough draft at best.
|
| 30 |
Mr. Showbiz
A laughable disaster: an agonizingly long, perversely dull, childishly conceived fantasia on marital sexual angst that could only have been made by someone (like Kubrick).
|
| 30 |
Slate
A somnolent load of wank.
|
| 20 |
Washington Post
It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.
|
| 20 |
Salon.com
Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.
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