Popular reviews

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  Review by maria ★★★ 4

  even bad kubrick is better than anything else if you're catching my drift

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★ 3

  kubrick hits the streets of ny with seemingly no script and no money and still comes out with something that'd probably be most other filmmakers' best-looking movie.

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  Review by Rafael "Parker!!" Jovine ★★★ 12

  Action! - Three Auteurs: Stan and the Thousand Ku(t)bricks

  Kubrick appears to have had a strong interest in cinema noir at this stage in his career. Some of these themes can be found in his first picture as well, but they really shine here.

  Unquestionably superior than his first, the technical side of this film features more and greater detail, especially in the way Kubrick and his crew illuminate everything with minimal resources, like in the scene in the room with the lamp. Kubrick's experience of filming a boxing match is put to good use here, but don't go in expecting Rocky or anything like it.

  Although the plot is not particularly original, the film is vastly improved by its…

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★½

  (The Average Joe’s Movie Club Cast)

  Criterion Collection Spine #575 (Part 2)

  Stanley Kubrick's underrated sophomore feature was so much better than I expected.

  "It's crazy how you can get yourself in a mess sometimes and not even be able to think about it with any sense-and yet not be able to think about anything else."

  Like many young cinephiles Stanley Kubrick was my first favorite director, so why am I just now finishing off watching all his feature films. After loving Kubrick's later work so much, I was underwhelmed when I finally got to his early movies like 'The Killing', and 'Paths of Glory'. Then since most people write off Killer’s Kiss, I did not even feel like bothering…

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  Review by CinemaCl🎃wn ★★★

  An underrated film-noir that turned out to be far more engaging than expected, Killer's Kiss is no masterpiece in my opinion but it did serve its purpose well as a warm up exercise for director Stanley Kubrick's talents before he started churning out one masterpiece after another until the very end of his legendary film career & is as experimental as his later features.

  The story revolves around Davey Gordon; a 29-year old boxer well past his prime, who's waiting at the train station for his girl and in an extended flashback recounts the happenings of his recent past. Filmed on a shoe-string budget, it presents Stanley Kubrick in charge of the responsibilities of director, cinematographer & editor all by himself, at…

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★

  Stanley Kubrick's second feature length film is a poorhouse Noir effort. The film is much more interesting as a precursor to a brilliant film career than it is a great film in its own right. The plot is fairly standard stuff - a story of a boxer who gets himself into trouble after falling head over heels for a woman he just met. It's mainly told through flashback and the low budget is obvious. Many scenes seem drawn out and there's a long stretch where the leading lady tells her story over the backdrop of a ballet dancer, obviously cheaper than actually filming it. Killer's Kiss does showcase Kubrick's eye for shot composition, and the film is a triumph in…

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★ 3

  A fairly standard noir romance from a man who would come to change cinema forever. A fighter who's been down on his luck finds he has little to hold on to when he meets a beautiful young dancer. However, her emotional entanglement with her manager puts him in a deadly situation when the boss demonstrates that he only has her to lose.

  You can see the seeds of Kubrick's genius especially in the framing and composition of his shots, many of which involve brilliant use of mirrors and windows. The story also uses a bold amount of flashback, more than once going two layers deep into the past and surfacing to the present once in the middle only to plunge back under. Unfortunately the story is just a bit too generic to stand out, and the final chase/fight scene slightly overstays its welcome. Solid little flick but it can't touch the masterpieces yet to come.

  Stanley Kubrick Ranked

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  Review by TajLV ★★½ 1

  "Like the man said, 'Can happiness buy money?'" ~ Vincent Rapallo

  Even renowned director Stanley Kubrick had his salad days. He was on welfare during the making of this film, his second feature, which he wrote, produced, directed, filmed and edited. In later years, he would describe this production as his "student level of filmmaking."

  All the shooting was conducted in New York City with virtually no budget and without on-location filming permits. In fact, it's been said that Kubrick had to negotiate with homeless people to use an East Side alley for the movie's murder scene.

  A borrowed spring-wound Eyemo camera was used for many of the sequences, and it was stolen before production ended. What's more, technical problems…

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  Review by anna nomaly ★★

  Would’ve been remembered as Kubrick doing for New York what Mann does for Los Angeles if it wasn’t so dramatically inert. Legalities be damned, the fact that Killer’s Kiss has no screenplay credit gets the full Nicolas Cage “you don’t say” from yours truly.

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  Review by siobhan ★★★½

  the way stanley kubrick escalated from making succinct 1 hour films at the beginning of his career to the extreme opposite with 3 hour films by the end

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  Review by WraithApe ★★★ 4

  Neither top-tier Kubrick nor top-tier noir, but still a fascinating artefact for anyone interested in charting the progress of the auteur. It's debatable whether it even constitutes a proper film noir - visually it fits the bill, it's got the voice-over, and there's the seedy urban milieu of back-alley-fire-escape New York, but it also lacks a lot of standard tropes. As ever, it seems Kubrick is less interested in the mechanics of genre than in the framework it provides him for exploring his own preoccupations, most notably at this point, photographic composition. We get a glimpse of Kubrick Future at times, exhibiting his magic eye for framing despite a very limited budget.

  The story is pretty rote: a washed-up boxer's…

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  Review by DallasFrance ★★★½ 4

  A pleasant surprise! A gnarly New York City noir with an airtight run time of just over an hour. Kubrick’s still finding his footing, but his photography gig at Life magazine has helped him develop a clear-eyed aesthetic perspective of Manhattan. The Untouchables chase has got nothing on Kubrick’s climactic views of fog-lined rooftops and deserted back-alleys. 

  I also like how unglamorous the final fight is. The two combatants are a mediocre boxer and a thug with a wallet, and they lunge at each other with the grace of drunk giraffes. 

  In the grand scheme of nuclear satire and sentient computers, Killer’s Kiss is starter kit Kubrick. His next outing was the excellent noir The Killing, though, and there’s a clear path from here to there. It’s well worth a watch!

  
  Stanley Kubrick Ranked