Eyes Wide Shut

Saturday, December 15, 2012 | 7:30 pm

2012: A Kubrick Odyssey
1999/color/159 min.

Scr: Stanley Kubrick, Frederic Raphael; dir: Stanley Kubrick w / Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack, Madison Eginton, Todd Field, Leelee Sobieski.

For a filmmaker who could create entire universes for each of his films and have long-vanished worlds vividly brought back to life on screen, the bedroom proved to be Kubrick’s final frontier. Eyes Wide Shut follows a wealthy Manhattan married couple (Tom Cruise… Show more and Nicole Kidman) as they are teased apart by sexual jealousy. Over the course of a single night, the husband is drawn into an outlandish odyssey of seduction and deathly intrigue that takes him through the nocturnal New York underworld and out to a remote and foreboding mansion. Adapted from Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel (aka Rhapsody), a 1926 Viennese novella that Kubrick first optioned in the 1970s, Eyes Wide Shut combines the oneiric chill of The Shining with A Clockwork Orange’s queasy candor. The film was released posthumously in the summer of 1999 after Kubrick passed away in March at the age of seventy, just weeks after wrapping the film’s two-year shoot. Met with mixed reviews upon its release, Eyes Wide Shut, like many a Kubrick film before it, has grown in stature in the passing years, becoming the end point in a long line of fascinating, enigmatic, and impeccable cult classics.

Bing Theater | $10 for the general public; $7 for LACMA members, seniors (62+), and students with valid ID; $5 LACMA Film Club members and Academy members with valid ID. | Tickets: 323 857-6010 or purchase online.

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