Kubrick's is a unified, coherent oeuvre, in the best auteur tradition. And yet, for myself I find there is always something in Kubrick's films, brilliant though most of them are, that seems to stop short of the total creative involvement of the true auteur. Is it perhaps that he is keeping back something vital of himself, that the films seem in a way like so many masks assumed by their maker rather than various aspects of his own face?…

Technically [Fear and Desire] leaves little to be desired: Kubrick's own camera work has considerable polish and a good professional finish spiced here and there with touches which suggest that his hours at the Museum of Modern Art were not ill spent—in particular the evocation of the dream-like forest landscape in a way which suggests some Japanese films, specifically Kurosawa's Rashomon for the sunlight flashing through the leaves...