1980   UK The Shining
The Shining Image Cover
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Director:Stanley Kubrick
Studio:Warner Brothers
Writer:Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick
IMDb Rating:8.5 (224,839 votes)
Awards:1 win & 5 nominations
Genre:Horror
Duration:144 min
Languages:English
IMDb:0081505
Amazon:B000I2J0W4
Search:NetflixYouTube
Stanley Kubrick  ...  (Director)
Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick  ...  (Writer)
 
Jack Nicholson  ...  Jack Torrance
Shelley Duvall  ...  Wendy Torrance
Danny Lloyd  ...  Danny Torrance
Scatman Crothers  ...  Dick Hallorann
Barry Nelson  ...  Stuart Ullman
Philip Stone  ...  Delbert Grady
Joe Turkel  ...  Lloyd the Bartender
Anne Jackson  ...  Doctor
Tony Burton  ...  Larry Durkin
Lia Beldam  ...  Young Woman in Bath
Billie Gibson  ...  Old Woman in Bath
Barry Dennen  ...  Bill Watson
David Baxt  ...  Forest Ranger #1
Manning Redwood  ...  Forest Ranger #2
Lisa Burns  ...  Grady Twin Daughter
John Alcott  ...  Cinematographer
Summary: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is less an adaptation of Stephen King's bestselling horror novel than a complete reimagining of it from the inside out. In King's book, the Overlook Hotel is a haunted place that takes possession of its off-season caretaker and provokes him to murderous rage against his wife and young son. Kubrick's movie is an existential Road Runner cartoon (his steadicam scurrying through the hotel's labyrinthine hallways), in which the cavernously empty spaces inside the Overlook mirror the emptiness in the soul of the blocked writer, who's settled in for a long winter's hibernation. As many have pointed out, King's protagonist goes mad, but Kubrick's Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) is Looney Tunes from the moment we meet him--all arching eyebrows and mischievous grin. (Both Nicholson and Shelley Duvall reach new levels of hysteria in their performances, driven to extremes by the director's fanatical demands for take after take after take.) The Shining is terrifying--but not in the way fans of the novel might expect. When it was redone as a TV miniseries (reportedly because of King's dissatisfaction with the Kubrick film), the famous topiary-animal attack (which was deemed impossible to film in 1980) was there--but the deeper horror was lost. Kubrick's The Shining gets under your skin and chills your bones; it stays with you, inhabits you, haunts you. And there's no place to hide... --Jim Emerson


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