2001: A Space Odyssey: Critic Reviews

[Retains] its artistic magnificence after more than 30 years.

Now, seen in the actual 2001, it's less a visionary masterpiece than a crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted and, above all, wrong.

The film creates its effects essentially out of visuals and music. It is meditative. It does not cater to us, but wants to inspire us, enlarge us.

It is an extraordinary, obsessive, beautiful work of art.

The film's projections of the cold war and antiquated product placements may look quaint now, but the poetry is as hard-edged and full of wonder as ever.

It was a freshening attitude then, though its long-term effects haven't been all to the good.

2001 compares with, but does not best, previous efforts at science fiction.

I assumed that this was what all movies ought to be: treasures for moral and aesthetic contemplation that did not provide all their answers on first contact.

A cold, majestic motion picture, a movie that seeks to remind us of the vastness of space and our relatively insignificant place in it.

Perhaps the beauty of 2001 is appreciating that some of the best stories are the ones that are half-told.

With his virtuosic adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Stanley Kubrick invented the modern science fiction film.

Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece is still relevant.

Kubrick set out to make "the proverbial good science-fiction film," but he came out the other side with something far more ornery and profound.

Central to the profundity of the film is the notion that few things are more meaningful than a child's first steps, the emotive impact of this scenario manifest in every one of the film's dizzying set pieces, albeit multiplied to epic proportions.

2001 certainly is a colossal bore, unless you're on its wavelength, in which case it's one of the greatest films of all time.

Prepare to be dazzled.

For all the essential coldness of Kubrick's vision, it demands attention as superior sci-fi, simply because it's more concerned with ideas than with Boy's Own-style pyrotechnics.

It has reached the status of Art, meaning that it's going to go on provoking strong opinions.

What else can such a film be called but ART?

Still one of the best

Part space opera, part cinematic symphony and part horror story, the film is a shape-shifting painting.

The most influential sci-fi film ever made, 2001 caused culture shock when released, forever changing the conventions, style, and prestige of the previously debased genre

Une lecon de cinema par l'un de ses plus grands artisans.

2001 speaks by monolith -- that is, by image, metaphor, poetry, and suggestion.

Doesn't just depict a quantum leap forward in human consciousness — it practically requires such a leap, on an individual scale, from the viewer.