Part of 1999
Just exactly what happened to Bill and Alice Harford during their time at the Ziegler Christmas party isn’t really in doubt. But their reactions to it differ, creating a schism that sends Dr. Bill (Tom Cruise) out into the night on a dark near-picaresque Barry Lyndon-of-a-grind that explores death, sex, the deepest of secrets and the shallowest of pretexts — while Alice (Nicole Kidman, staggeringly good) keeps the hearth and protects the home from the horny insecurities of men. Stanley Kubrick’s final film doesn’t look or feel like anything else — the former due to unaugmented holiday lighting pushed two f-stops, the latter because Arthur Schnitzler’s “Dream Story” takes paths eerily resonant to millennial sidewalks and grand hallways.
“Provides a stunning epiphany for the summer of the dirty joke. This is a dead-serious film about sexual yearnings, one that flirts with ridicule yet sustains its fundamental eeriness and gravity throughout. The dreamlike intensity of previous Kubrick visions is in full force here, in an adaptation of a 1926 Viennese novella that is stark and haunting in its own right.” —Janet Maslin, New York Times (Jul 16, 1999)
“A delicious, deadpan farce about the fragile masculine ego.” —Sean Burns, Metro Boston
“The perfect embodiment of capitalist Christmas tendencies, wherein money talks and class supplants everything.” —Jason Shawhan, Nashville Scene