SOURCE: “Imperfect Love: Stanley Kubrick's Last Film,” in Film Comment, Vol. 35, No. 5, September-October, 1999, pp. 25-33.

In the following review, Taubin addresses the flaws of Eyes Wide Shut, maintaining that the movie was unfinished, but compelling on several levels.

To be blunt about it, it's impossible at this moment to separate thoughts and feelings about Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut from the fact of his death. Or to put it another way, Kubrick's death is the closure that his final film, for better or worse, resists to the last. The ultimate Kubrick irony is that the director died while making a film that sides with Eros in the eternal struggle between, as Freud termed it, Eros and Thanatos, Eros and the death instinct. Kubrick's great subject—the subject that each of his films confronts—is mortality, and he presents it sometimes as tragedy, sometimes as farce, sometimes as both...