The supernatural joins forces with psychosis in Stanley Kubrick’s superb adaptation of a Stephen King bestseller.

| Oct 20, 2023

Kubrick sabotages his own thesis in the most knuckleheaded way conceivable: we can't be charged as accomplices in horror when there is no horror.

| Aug 16, 2022

There are a few terrific thrills, and some eerie moments of dislocation that only Kubrick could achieve, but most of the movie is unfelt, unscary, and bizarrely heavy-handed. It's the first pompous haunted-house movie.

| Jun 17, 2022

"The Shining" is woke, both in that the movie subtly addresses complex social issues and because the in-universe clairvoyant act of shining allows characters to see past and future atrocities (some politically charged) that occurred in the Overlook Hotel.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Nov 6, 2019

It's an interesting movie, but not the ultimate work in its genre that some expected from one of the great directors.

| Sep 24, 2019

The altered tone suits Kubrick's gallows humor, which was always about confronting and critiquing his audience's baser impulses: reinventing The Shining as a slapstick comedy about murderous patriarchal insecurity is a daring move.

| Sep 5, 2019

Kubrick is master of visual images, and many of the scenes display his brilliance. But much of the suspense ends in anti-climax, and Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall seem over-extended in trying to maintain the terror.

| Jul 17, 2019

When you sit down to The Shining, you sit down with normal expectations of being diverted, perhaps even being gripped, but not being undermined. But the film undermines you in powerful, inchoate ways.

| Apr 26, 2018

Shock effect and graphic imagery don't compensate for the sense of pointlessness and even distaste that is left at the end of the movie.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 22, 2016

If The Shining isn't trivial, it certainly encourages one to think that it is. But, perhaps, even that's a change for the better. Generally, it's the other way around.

| Feb 17, 2016

A masterpiece.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Oct 6, 2013

Deeply scary and strange.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 1, 2012

Essential viewing. Prepare to be disturbed.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Nov 1, 2012

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

| Oct 21, 2010

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

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

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.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 19, 2007

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.

| May 8, 2007

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

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 8, 2007

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.

| May 8, 2007

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

Full Review | Mar 7, 2005