Eyes Wide Shut

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

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.

USA Today Mike Clark

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.

Film.com Peter Brunette

As the late Stanley Kubrick's swansong, it fills the bill magnificently.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin

Above all a masterpiece of sustained tone, a tightrope act that pays off in rich and unexpected ways.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

A spellbinder: provocatively conceived, gorgeously shot and masterfully executed.

Film.com Sean Means

A movie with the power and quality of dreams, where reality merges into symbolism and oddly juxtaposed elements crystallize into a single, electrifying whole.

Variety Todd McCarthy

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.

The New York Times Elvis Mitchell

Kubrick left one more brilliantly provocative tour de force as his epitaph.

Film.com Robert Horton

It's Kubrick, for sure, and in often mesmerizing form.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

In terms of power and effect, Eyes Wide Shut approaches (but does not surpass) Kubrick's vintage work - it is thought-provoking and unsettling.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

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.

TV Guide Maitland McDonagh

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.

Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan

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]

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

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.

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.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

It's painstakingly paced, but it's also entrancing.

Austin Chronicle Marc Savlov

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.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

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.

San Francisco Chronicle Bob Graham

Totally absorbing even when it, too, strays.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

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.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

Ultimately, Eyes Wide Shut doesn't rank among Kubrick's best work.

TNT RoughCut Christopher Brandon

It's a mind-blowing game, and all that nonsense about this being an erotic thriller was merely part of Kubrick's game.

San Francisco Examiner Wesley Morris

Works more as an object of pop curiosity than as a work of popular entertainment.

New York Post Rod Dreher

It's shocking only in its banality, impotence and utter lack of heat.

LA Weekly Manohla Dargis

It's good -- when it's not adrift in an absence of meaning.

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.

New York Post Jonathan Foreman

Eyes Wide Shut is Stanley Kubrick's Hindenberg.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

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.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

Feels like a rough draft at best.

Mr. Showbiz Michael Atkinson

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).

Slate David Edelstein

A somnolent load of wank.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

It's empty of ideas, which is fine, but it's also empty of heat.

Salon.com Charles Taylor

Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.