Why so much hype?

Great Film overall

A Masterpiece!

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

Stanley Kubrick was an intensely interesting man. He was also secretive and reclusive. Not surprisingly,very little media exists about Stanley and/or the production of his films.Jon Ronson has taken boxes from Kubrick's house and opened them. The boxes contain pictures and documents from the director's productions and after examination, permit the Kubrick curious to glimpse aspects of Stanley's mind and method. Ronson puts the distillation of his finds into this meandering documentary film.There are some impediments during the film. Ronson's voice is irritatingly nasal and high pitched. And when he pronounces the letter "S", the sibilance is so intense that his deliberately calm demeanor becomes painful.Also, there is too much of Mr Ronson in the film. The viewer could be forgiven if they were to be confused about his the subject and who is the reporter.Otherwise, the subject of Kubrick's Boxes is fertile ground for you if are interested in the man. And with some effort and concentration, we got past the Mr Ronson's heavy hand and grating voice.

To be quite honest, and I say this as a major Kubrick fan, hoping to direct films myself one day, that I learned more about the man from this one documentary than I have any other. It is short, yes, but it describes the genius and eccentricity of Kubrick so well.I really can understand Jon Ronson when he says he was privileged by the experience, going through the so called "kubrick boxes" getting an incredible insight in Kubrick's mind. Also I was relieved when they in the end said that the boxes where now stored in a London film school for preservation and educational purposes.There really isn't anything wrong about this documentary, other than Jon Ronson's bad habit of giving some rather silly and stupid movie references in the middle of interviews and as I said earlier, it was a little short. If Jon Ronson ever decided to make a longer cut of this documentary, I would love too see it.

Documentary from Sundance and Channel 4 about Stanley Kubrick's boxes. The boxes contain all of the research for all of his films from 2001 to Eyes Wide Shut. It's the story of a man who was obsessed with the films he made and all of the tiny little details involved in making them. Its a tribute to the depths that Kubrick would go to to make a film. It also shows why in the later years so few films were made as his planned film on the Holocaust was sidelined when Steven Spielberg planned and shot Schindler's List while Kubrick was still wading through the research. We see the Fan letters, the crank letters, reports on books and scripts as possible subjects (including a pass on the Killing Fields), film of Kubrick shooting films, the odd memos, the stationery, and everything else that Kubrick collected when he made (and tried to make) films. It'a an intriguing portrait of a man, or at least a man's obsessions through his detritus. It's more a side bar portrait to the man rather than a full portrait and actually would make a nice companion piece to the short documentary thats on the Eyes Wide Shut DVD The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick and Eyes Wide Shut. Worth a look if you've ever wondered about the man and his obsessions which were always oddly reported in the media.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes (2008) **** (out of 4) I've often wondered what type of genius or madman someone like Kubrick would have to be in order to create the masterpieces that he did and this documentary tries to uncover some of that. Director Ronson was invited to the Kubrick Estate to go through thousands of boxes that Kubrick had saved up throughout the years and what we see are some rather amazing items, which show why it took the director so long to make movies. In his final 19-years Kubrick only made three films and the reasons why are discussed here. If you're a fan of Kubrick then I don't see how it would be possible not to love this documentary even though, sadly, it only runs for just under an hour. Some of the things we see and learn are rather shocking and mysterious. The mysterious figure that Kubrick was is certainly going to be even more mysterious after this film but it does give us a close look at how the genius worked. The most amazing section were notes from fans that the director collected. Apparently he read them all and would mark them as being positive, negative or crank meaning threatening. He would then take the letters and put them together by the movie and then break them down into the cities where they came from. Even more astounding is how much pre-production he would do when making movies. He had his nephew, a photographer, spend a year taking pictures of stuff that would eventually go into Eyes Wide Shut and that includes thousands of photographs for gates, which would end up only being seen for a matter of seconds in the movie. Fans of Full Metal Jacket will also get a kick out of learning that Vivian Kubrick's documentary is still safe and at the estate in the form of 18-hours worth of footage. We get to see a few clips here including one with Kubrick debating when tea breaks should happen. There's a lot of wonderful footage in this documentary and it's great to know that the Estate has turned all of this stuff over to the London University of Arts where anyone can go and look through them. The bad news is that it's apparently true that Kubrick destroyed all the outtakes from his films, which is strange since this documentary shows that he saved everything. There's also some great talk about his Holocaust movie, which he worked on for nearly three years before giving up on it after the Spielberg movie started production.