POP UP CINEMA BRIGHTON

White Wall Cinema presents

THURSDAY DECEMBER 10TH

Christmas Special
STANLEY KUBRICK'S
EYES WIDE SHUT
 TOM CRUISE SEASON
 4K REMASTER

DIRECTOR: Stanley Kubrick

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STARRING: Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Sydney Pollack & Todd Field

Firstly, yes: Eyes Wide Shut is a Christmas film. Not simply because it is set at Christmas, but because almost every scene is adorned with Christmas decorations, including at least 17 fully dressed Christmas trees. That so many viewers have never noticed this is a testament to the strange, hypnotic world Kubrick has so meticulously created.

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The final film from one of the greatest directors in cinema history, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut arrived in the wake of perhaps the most extraordinary run of films ever committed to celluloid. Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Lolita, Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket: an uninterrupted succession of masterpieces stretching back to 1957.

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After a 12-year absence following Full Metal Jacket, Kubrick submitted his final cut of what would be his final film on March 1, 1999. He died just six days later, on March 7. The result is perhaps his most psychologically intense and unsettling work, all the more remarkable for its deceptively simple premise and cool, measured surface.

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Casting the real-life married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as its central protagonists, Kubrick understood precisely how to exploit the tension at the heart of their relationship, mining their public personas and their remarkable capacity to project icy detachment, vulnerability and anxiety.

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The story centres on Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise), who, following a startling confession from his wife, Alice (Kidman), about her sexual fantasies, embarks on an increasingly obsessive odyssey through a dreamlike Manhattan in search of sexual adventure. But as Bill ventures further into the night, he finds himself drawn into a clandestine sexual underworld inhabited by the city's wealthy and powerful.

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Suspicion, illusion, fear, jealousy, desire, doubt and discovery permeate this psychosexual masterpiece. It is Kubrick’s final, enigmatic statement on his enduring fascination with the relationship between institutional authority and the individual. A searing, haunting, baffling and beguiling journey into the politics of sexuality, marriage and the hidden power structures of the elite, Eyes Wide Shut is designed to confound and captivate, terrify and titillate, often all at once.

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And all of this is wrapped in a bow of exquisite, uncompromising craftsmanship: from the extraordinary production design and hypnotic cinematography to the meticulously calibrated performances. Kubrick’s final film is truly the Christmas gift that keeps on giving: an endlessly tantalising labyrinth of symbols, secrets and ambiguities whose myriad meanings are still being unravelled to this day. See it in it's new 4K remaster this Christmas at White Wall Cinema.