4) Eyes Wide Shut
In a career that spanned four decades, Stanley Kubrick’s ambitiousness as a filmmaker never faltered. In many ways, his final movie – a 1999 erotic fantasy thriller named Eyes Wide Shut – was perhaps his most daring of all. Kubrick was an infamous perfectionist, and some have argued that the amount of sheer energy and imagination he put into this movie might have contributed to his fatal heart attack that came at the age of 70.
Eyes Wide Shut is a fitting final cut for a master of the cinematic art form. A dizzying delve into the human psyche, with two of Hollywood’s hottest stars at its centre in Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, the movie examines the aspects of love, jealousy, trust, paranoia, and most prominently, sexual desire.
The movie has the same sickly creepiness of an earlier Kubrick work in The Shining, but manifests itself in the form of a moody erotic drama as opposed to a horror movie. Littered with Venetian masks, frowning faces, and a whole lot of writhing, sweaty bodies, Eyes Wide Shut is a loopy mind-trip about fierce sexual cravings. It’s pure mind-bending adult brilliance.