The Shining

King hated it, called Kubrick a man who thinks too much and feels too little, and wrote his own miniseries in 1997 to correct the record. Everybody else was right.

The hotel is impossible on purpose. The Overlook's geography does not close: a window in an office that could only look into another room, corridors that cannot fit, a lift that arrives from nowhere. Kubrick built it that way and never explained it, and the effect is that you feel lost in a space you have watched somebody walk through fifty times.

It was one of the first films to use a Steadicam extensively, which is why the tricycle sequences move the way they do.

Shelley Duvall was subjected to a shoot that has been documented at length and is not a fun story. Her performance is the one the film actually depends on.

The European cut runs 119 minutes and removes an entire epilogue. The 144-minute US version is the one to watch.