Kubrick's Men

The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic-or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone.



The stories that Kubrick's movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of...