Kubrick, Ranked

Before Scorsese became my guiding light, I was — and remain — a committed Kubrick nut. In a perverse way, given the aesthetic distance with which he approached his films, Kubrick reminds me of Kurosawa, in that both could draw the circles of casual moviegoers and arthouse cinephiles together to make a VENN diagram with him in the middle. Not all of his features worked — funny as it is, I would have preferred that Lolita had gone to a more emotionally inclined director — but few directors have created so many example of high art that also function, in some form, as crowd pleasers.