Critics reviews

Importantly, both [The Wife and Eyes Wide Shut] are Christmas confections. The performances are skillful, earnest, even - but the films themselves are black comedies. A little trashy, and a lot of fun.

It's a movie about spectacle, it's about performance, it's about costumes (it is literally about costumes), it's about the neon blue light of the moon. Two decades earlier, they would've given this script to Russ Meyer and he also would have turned it into a complex, contradictory horror smut melodrama, which is what Eyes Wide Shut is. Or at least that's what it felt like yesterday.

In the film, Kubrick explores the connection (or lack thereof) among culture, wealth, and morality in a discreet and non-polemical manner. Potentially straightforward readings are disrupted by contradictions in parallel plots, resulting in a film that creates a world rather than proves a thesis. All of this, of course, is accompanied by the director's characteristically exquisite mise-en-scène.

To watch it is to revel in its uncanny, blue-tinged, intentionally faux New York atmosphere. Combine that with the excellent performances from Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman—whose celebrity statuses only heighten the onscreen stakes as they embody a chilly, patrician couple—and when you step out of the theater, the holiday lights in the streets are sure to look a little more mysterious.

This film, Kubrick's last, was the work of a perfectionist at odds with his own perfectionism; it found the director confronting the absence in his own cinema of any desire that might stabilize or ground him in the physical world. What's left is a labyrinth with no center, a fleshless, bloodless rabbit-hole down which, if you're not careful, you could keep on falling forever.

[It’s] only truly unsettling on contemplation: on the surface, it’s one of Kubrick’s funniest (with some of the most eccentric supporting performances in anything he made after THE KILLING) and most luminous, capturing the allure of Manhattan in winter with remarkably simple lighting arrangements.

Eyes Wide Shut is no masterpiece, but it is endlessly fascinating.

The climactic dialogue between Harford and Ziegler in Ziegler's huge town house — a remarkable scene that runs a little over 13 minutes — has been getting some flack from reviewers who claim it explains too much. But it explains nothing conclusive, apart from Ziegler's Zeus-like access and power and Harford's ultimate remoteness from those reaches; Ziegler holds all the cards, and we and Harford hold none.