The Shining: Critic Reviews

Kubrick isn't out for screams, but he manages to make his movie thoroughly unnerving by keeping the horror so close to home.

The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.

Kubrick is after a cool, sunlit vision of hell, born in the bosom of the nuclear family, but his imagery -- with its compulsive symmetry and brightness -- is too banal to sustain interest, while the incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense.

With everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller.

As a ghost story and adaptation of the Stephen King novel, it's largely a failure. On the other hand, as an example of directorial bravura and as a study of madness and the unreliable narrator, it's a brilliant success.

Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level.

Kubrick doesn't dumb it down or anything, but he's not actively trying to appeal only to film connoisseurs either. If any of his movies could be called mainstream, it's this one.

The Shining is an intense and not always ingratiating experience, a natural bookend to 2001...

The result may not quite match Kubrick's greatest films, but it is enthralling and hypnotic - a brilliant, ambitious attempt to shoot a horror film without the Gothic trappings.

The Shining met the fate of several other Stanley Kubrick films when it came out; most viewers did not like it, so they rejected it. Most importantly, they did not understand it in any way which allowed them to deal with it constructively.

It's arguably the talented director's least appealing film, as it feels empty and soulless.

It's the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.

One of the late 20th century's finest tales of the supernatural and a justly famous classic.

Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions... and also makes you jump.

With remarkable visual panache and a keen sense of irony, Stanley Kubrick rehabilitates Stephen King's trashy, terrifying novel.

Kubrick's mostly riveting attempt to rewrite the conventions of the horror genre

Kubrick's unbalanced approach (over-emphasis on production values) results in soulless cardboard cutouts who can do little to generate audience empathy.

Kubrick's use of space and the eerie steadycam have never been put to better use.

Kubrick's spellbinding 1980 horror epic is one of the true masterpieces to come out of the genre. And Nicholson's descent into unbridled insanity is simply unforgettable.

I fear all work and no play has made Stanley a dull boy.

If Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is not the best haunted house movie ever made, it is certainly among the most intricately constructed.

"Here's Johnny!" ... Kubrick's grandiose Jack-in-a-box shocker is a fright, but it's hardly up to his earlier brilliance.

Regardless of how you read the film, there's little denying that it's a masterful work.

The Shining goes halfway toward bringing back Franz Kafka's understanding of real horror as the evil that lies within.

An immortal classic.