What happened to the Kubrick who used to slip in sly, subtle jokes and little editing tricks? This may be his worst movie.

| Sep 13, 2023

Full Metal Jacket is violent, caustic, ironic, and cold, an amoral object formed from a camera gliding majestically across slow-motion carnage while refusing to blink an eye or shed a tear.

| Dec 7, 2022

Kubrick is trying to make a movie about madness and chaos, but he won't give in to the chaos.

| Aug 9, 2022

The most horrifying moments of Full Metal Jacket are those in which the young Americans gladly assist in their own damnation.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 9, 2022

Full Metal Jacket seems further proof that Kubrick is still trapped in self-pleasing cinematic exercise.

| Nov 6, 2017

[Kubrick's] genius, and perhaps burden, is to see the insanity in us all and to make it seem so terrifyingly normal.

Full Review | Jun 24, 2015

If his considerable achievement in this long- awaited film falls short of his Olympian standards, there is a reason that ought to give Kubrick some satisfaction. The world has caught up with Kubrick and what he has to say.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jun 21, 2013

It may seem too spare, too clinical, its moments of war even too familiar for some. But, aiming for minds as well as hearts, Kubrick hits his target squarely.

| Jun 21, 2013

What gives this story its power is not really its originality, but the relentlessness of Kubrick's black-comic vision and the tightness of his focus.

| Jun 21, 2013

There is a real fear at the heart of this monstrously armored, desperately defensive film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 21, 2013

It's a great piece of filmmaking, diminished only by a second act that fails to live up to the first act of the Marines in training.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 21, 2013

Visually poetic, darkly humorous, uncompromisingly brutal, and subversive in every way, Full Metal Jacket is easily one of the best war movies without being remotely similar to your standard issue war flick.

| Original Score: 94/100 | Mar 31, 2009

Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt.

| Aug 24, 2008

Somehow after the decadence of Barry Lyndon and a philosophical look at horror in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick settled into a film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 19, 2007

A hardy Kubrikian effort that warms on you with repeated viewings.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Oct 2, 2007

This is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what The Shining failed to do.

| May 8, 2007

An intense, schematic, superbly made Vietnam War drama.

| May 8, 2007

Kubrick's direction is as steely cold and manipulative as the rgime it depicts, and we never really get to know, let alone care about, the hapless recruits on view.

| Jan 26, 2006

The film's most gut-wrenching horrors occur in the first half, thanks to the regimens imposed by real-life drill instructor Lee Ermey.

| Mar 10, 2003

Full Metal Jacket, ice and wildfire, order and chaos, is intellectual war, hard thought.

| Jan 1, 2000