A Clockwork Orange: Critic Reviews

A most unusual -- and disorienting -- movie experience.

At once [Kubrick's] most thematically problematic film and his most unforgettably sensational.

A Clockwork Orange is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading as an Orwellian warning.

A very bad film -- snide, barely competent, and overdrawn -- that enjoys a perennial popularity, perhaps because its confused moral position appeals to the secret Nietzscheans within us.

Stanley Kubrick's latest film takes the heavy realities of the 'do-your-thing' and 'law-and-order' syndromes, runs them through a cinematic centrifuge, and spews forth the commingled comic horrors of a regulated society.

It demands thought, compels the attention, and refuses to be dismissed.

A merciless, demoniac satire in the future imperfect.

A violent meditation on violence. Not for kids.

The rare film that hits you in the head and stomach simultaneously.

There's Stanley Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," and then there's everything else.

The music made me do it

Producer-director Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel is a strangely overwhelming experience %u2013 at time contemptible, and yet always valid in its sardonic outlook.

Ambitious and stylized (perhaps to a fault), Kubrick's poignantly prophetic satire of crime and punishment, redemption and free will, is still much misunderstood by critics emphasizing its ultra-violence.

Spectacular, operatic, colorful, and exquisitely photographed.

All of Kubricks films have generated controversy, but this one engendered outright hostility.

Directed with assurance and filled with the cynicism, paranoia, visual flair (and lurid titillation) that characterised so much of his work, this is vintage Kubrick and classic cinema.

Remains as unsettling and shocking today as the day it was released.

Who else but Stanley Kubrick could successfully direct an ultra-stylish, sci-fi cult film about the impossibility of redemption in the absence of freely willed sin?

Ice cold, indecent, and way too obvious to be in any way deep.

A sexless, inhuman film, whose power derives from a ruthless subordination of its content to the demands of telling a good story.

May be Kubrick's greatest film, for its lasting influence and social significance.

It's a very dark message, but maybe that's why the film caught on as a video cult item in the 80s.

Technically, the film is a marvel. It's easily Kubrick's best and boldest work.