Every Stanley Kubrick Film Ranked from Worst to Best

If you had to pick a sin­gle fig­ure to rep­re­sent the con­cept of the film auteur, you could do much worse than Stan­ley Kubrick. That’s not to call him the great­est direc­tor who ever lived, nor even to call his body of work the great­est in cin­e­ma. But no fil­mog­ra­phy more clear­ly bears the stamp of a sin­gle pre­sid­ing intel­li­gence across var­i­ous eras, gen­res, and styles. On one lev­el, Kubrick nev­er made the same movie twice. On anoth­er, each is but a facet of the larg­er project of ren­der­ing on film his ever more aes­thet­i­cal­ly immac­u­late, ever less com­fort­ing world­view, one that encom­pass­es both Dr. Strangelove and The Shin­ing, both Loli­ta and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For that and oth­er rea­sons, Kubrick­’s fil­mog­ra­phy has long occu­pied a pecu­liar posi­tion in cin­e­ma cul­ture. Despite hav­ing pro­vid­ed gen­er­a­tions of movie­go­ers their intro­duc­tion to the “art house,” it also repays the most seri­ous degrees of engage­ment and scruti­ny. Some­how, as Lewis Bond puts it in the record­ed Twitch stream above, Kubrick has remained both cin­e­ma’s gate­way drug and its “final boss.”

You may know Bond’s name — or more like­ly, rec­og­nize his voice — from the many film-relat­ed video essays of his (under the ban­ners of Chan­nel Criswell, The Cin­e­ma Car­tog­ra­phy, and now The House of Tab­u­la) we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, includ­ing an exe­ge­sis of Kubrick he made near­ly a decade ago. It says some­thing that even some­one as auteur-obsessed for as long as he’s been can’t resist anoth­er trip to the well.

Over the two-hour course of his stream, Bond dis­cuss­es each and every one of Kubrick­’s films while rank­ing them against each oth­er. It will hard­ly pro­voke much con­tro­ver­sy that he starts at the bot­tom with the ram­shackle thriller Fear and Desire, the debut fea­ture that even Kubrick him­self attempt­ed to strike from the record. What real­ly gets cinephiles talk­ing are the rel­a­tive mer­its of the pic­tures high­er up the list: Does The Shin­ing tran­scend hor­ror, or Dr. Strangelove tran­scend com­e­dy? Is the sen­sa­tion­al­ism of A Clock­work Orange or the state­li­ness of Bar­ry Lyn­don to be count­ed for or against those films? Is Eyes Wide Shut a late mas­ter­piece or, as some thought in 1999, a late mess? Bond jokes that his is the objec­tive­ly cor­rect rank­ing of Kubrick­’s fil­mog­ra­phy, and per­haps it does align with crit­i­cal con­sen­sus on many points. But few film-lovers will be entire­ly free of the temp­ta­tion to watch through it and judge again for them­selves.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made His Mas­ter­pieces: An Intro­duc­tion to His Obses­sive Approach to Film­mak­ing

How 2001: A Space Odyssey Became “the Hard­est Film Kubrick Ever Made”

The Invis­i­ble Hor­ror of The Shin­ing: How Music Makes Stan­ley Kubrick’s Icon­ic Film Even More Ter­ri­fy­ing

Sig­na­ture Shots from the Films of Stan­ley Kubrick: One-Point Per­spec­tive

“Kubrick/Tarkovsky”: A Video Essay Explores the Visu­al Sim­i­lar­i­ties Between the Two “Cin­e­mat­ic Giants”

Stan­ley Kubrick’s List of Top 10 Films: The First and Only List He Ever Cre­at­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.