One might often disagree with Kubrick's ideas, at times even find them a bit silly, but none of that detracts from the fact that Kubrick puts together picture shows which are entertaining, aesthetically pleasing, and provoking, all at the same time.

Kubrick is, among other things, a true screen poet. He knows how to use visual images to communicate. Movies should probably never communicate anything with words that could be communicated with a picture, and Kubrick's rarely do. Kubrick characterizes a gangster by the way he handles a gun in The Killing, a strange family triangle with a peck on the cheek in Lolita, a mad general by the way he chomps his cigar in Dr. Strangelove. What is wonderful about Kubrick's imagistic skill is that theme and image conjoin so naturally in his movies. In Paths of Glory soldiers attacking a hill called "The Anthill" really look...