Eyes Wide Shut

Director: Stanley Kubrick

1999 / 159min / DCP

Christmas lights take on a malevolent gleam in Kubrick’s final masterpiece, a free adaptation of Dream Story, Viennese author Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novella of erotic compulsion. Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) hits the shivering streets of a dreamlike “Manhattan”—doubled for by London, with second-unit work in NYC courtesy of Arthur Jafa—after a pot-hazy domestic bust-up with wife Alice (Nicole Kidman), setting out on an odyssey to ease his bruised male ego that will lead him to what is certainly the freakiest Christmas party in all of cinema. The password at the box office is “Fidelio.”

Part of Holiday Classics at Metrograph: 2023