The Complete Kubrick: A Season of Celebrating the Legendary Director

Hollywood’s feted genius, chessmaster, international man of mystery; yet a simple Jewish mama’s boy, insatiably curious, who retained his plainspoken Bronx drawl and unconditional adoration of his family and pets to his dying day; across thirteen feature films in just under half a century, the greatest enduring gift of Stanley Kubrick may be his obliteration of boundaries. A formalist of myriad forms, a deeply intellectual filmmaker whose most powerful images came surging from the unconscious, a mighty humanist and acerbic misanthrope, a consummate artist and blockbuster showman whose work is equally adored by artists and scientists, film scholars, midnight-movie fiends, and the general public. To this day, no label can contain Kubrick. To appreciate him is to stand in awe of the revelation that radical formal experimentation, intellectual curiosity, and mass-cultural appeal—contrary to widely held belief—do not need to be enemies. Genre does not need to be a lower form; story structure does not need to stifle spontaneity and mystery. Here is a man who did it all and left behind the sense that he’d barely got started.

Criterion’s new 4K Stanley Kubrick collection presents, for the very first time, a comprehensive box featuring every single one of the master’s completed films, from his early shorts to trailblazing features with MGM and Warner Bros., stunningly restored and with a rich selection of desserts and hors d’oeuvres. Across thirteen discs, we’ve had the incalculable pleasure of revisiting his full body of work, including commentaries and supplements as old as the heyday of LaserDisc and as new as this year (prepare to learn how HAL-9000 predicted LLM “hallucinations” as you buckle in for Luca Guadagnino’s 2001-conversant Artificial), as well as a set of enlightening documentaries about the director and his work, some of them newly restored. 

In celebration of this milestone in Kubrick collecting, and in hopes of a Kubrick renaissance with a moviegoing public starved for true boldness and invention in the film industry, we’ve decided to roll out a season of features dedicated to the filmmaker’s oeuvre and beyond, going through Criterion’s box era by era and disc by disc—plus a couple of surprises from the archives. For those who haven’t yet earned their bachelor’s in Kubrickology, we hope we can sway you to fill in your gaps. And for those who know Stanley ball, we hope we can make you misty-eyed on a nostalgic trip to the outer limits. Welcome to our season of Kubrick.

Features

Part I: Early Documentary Shorts, Fear and Desire, and Killer’s Kiss

Part II: The Killing, Paths of Glory, and Spartacus

Coming soon.

Part III: Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Coming soon.

Part IV: A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining

Coming soon.

Part V: Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut

Coming soon.

Interviews

“He Wanted the Films to Survive”: Michael Chaiken on Assembling Criterion’s The Complete Kubrick

“That Cut Is Stanley’s Cut”: Nigel Galt on Editing Eyes Wide Shut with Kubrick

Plus, stay tuned for more from the Kubrick archive!

The Complete Kubrick is now available through the Criterion Collection.