SOURCE: “Strangelove,” in New York, Vol. 32, No. 28, July 26, 1999, pp. 49-50.

In the following review of Eyes Wide Shut, Rainer offers a mixed assessment of Kubrick's movie.

Eyes Wide Shut is being billed as more than a movie, more than even a Tom Cruise-and-Nicole Kidman movie: It's a Stanley Kubrick movie, which means, if his rep holds, that it's supposed to somehow intuit what's going on in our innermost lives and divine a millennial mood we may not yet even be aware of. The film is poised to be an epochal pop-cultural event, an art block-buster. And since it's Kubrick's last, the genius-visionary mystique machine has been turned on by the media full-blast. Eyes Wide Shut is going to be read or, more to the point, misread as some kind of valedictory. But Kubrick never intended for this film to be his last—he was, for example, famously caught...