Tom Cruise in Cannes

 

Cannes, France

Tom Cruise and the cast of the film ‘Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning’ take a selfie with director Christopher McQuarrie at the 78th international film festival

Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/Scott Garfitt/Invision/

THE GUARDIAN

Kubrick’s Cruise Kidman Schnitzler Sex Sizzler

Kubrick’s Cruise Kidman Schnitzler Sex Sizzler

An excerpt from ‘Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker’: Dreaming, With ‘Eyes Wide Shut’

BY

DAVID MIKICS

AUGUST 10, 2020

A.I., the Aryan Papers, and Eyes Wide Shut all present characters who are locked into their roles and cannot be authentic: the robot boy who yearns to be accepted as real, the Jewish child forced to masquerade as a gentile, and the man Bill Harford who cannot quite dare to break through from dreaming about a sexual adventure to actually having one. Like Barry Lyndon, Bill remains on the outside looking in even when he’s at the center of the action.

Mickey Rourke Thinks Tom Cruise Is “Irrelevant”

Mickey Rourke

Mickey Rourke Thinks Tom Cruise Is “Irrelevant”

The Wrestler actor laid into Cruise on Piers Morgan Uncensored, saying that Cruise has “been doing the same effing part for 35 years.”

Chris Murphy

July 15, 2022

Mickey Rourke is officially over Tom Cruise. The Wrestler actor recently shared how he really felt about the Top Gun: Maverick star, calling Cruise “irrelevant” and claiming that Cruise has “been doing the same effing part for 35 years.”

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EYES WIDE SHUT: I WAKE UP DREAMING 

Review by J. Hoberman

by J. Hoberman

The best thing about Eyes Wide Shut may be its title, but anyone planning to see Stanley Kubrick’s long-awaited, posthumously released swan song is advised to go with their eyes open. Completed by Warner Bros. after the director’s death last March (and shamelessly proclaimed a “brilliant,” “haunting” “masterpiece” in the advance cover story provided by the studio’s corporate sibling, Time), this two hour and 39 minute gloss on Arthur Schnitzler’s fantasmagoric novella feels like a rough draft at best.
At worst, Eyes Wide Shut is ponderously (up)dated—as though Kubrick had finally gotten around to responding to Michelangelo Antonioni’s druggy Blow-Up—if not weirdly anachronistic. (It’s difficult to make a movie about a city you last set foot in 35 years ago.) Shot in London, Eyes Wide Shut opens in a fabulous Upper West Side apartment filled with florid paintings, Alice (Nicole Kidman) stripping down to dress up—and not for the last time. She and her doctor husband Bill (Tom Cruise) have been invited to the splendiferous Christmas bash hosted by a wealthy sleazebag of mystery (Sydney Pollack).

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EYES WIDE SHUT: IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES

by Jonathan Rosenbaum

Writing about Eyes Wide Shut in Time, Richard Schickel had this to say about its source, Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 Traumnovelle: “Like a lot of the novels on which good movies are based, it is an entertaining, erotically charged fiction of the second rank, in need of the vivifying physicalization of the screen and the kind of narrative focus a good director can bring to imperfect but provocative life—especially when he has been thinking about it as long as Kubrick had”—i.e., at least since 1968, when he asked his wife to read it. This more or less matches the opinion of Frederic Raphael, Kubrick’s credited cowriter, as expressed in his recent memoir, Eyes Wide Open. But I would argue that Traumnovelle is a masterpiece worthy of resting alongside Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” Kafka’s The Trial, and Sadegh Hedayat’s The Blind Owl. Like the Poe story, it features a phantasmal masked ball with dark and decadent undercurrents, and like the Kafka and Hedayat novels, it continually and ambiguously crosses back and forth between fantasy and waking reality. But it differs from all three in having a development that might be described as therapeutic—Schnitzler, a doctor, was a friend of Freud—making Eyes Wide Shut a rare departure for Kubrick and concluding his career with the closest thing in his work to a happy ending. Moreover, the question about the novella isn’t whether Kubrick has “brought it to life”—it lives vibrantly without him, even if he has brought it to a lot of people’s attention, including mine—but whether he’s done it justice, a problem also raised by his films of Lolita and A Clockwork Orange.

Posters / Stanley Kubrick / Eyes Wide Shut

Stanley Kubrick

EYES WIDE SHUT

Posters

Eyes wide shut / What the Critics Failed to See in Kuibrick`s Last Film

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EYES WIDE SHUT: WHAT THE CRITICS FAILED TO SEE IN KUBRICK’S LAST FILM 

by Lee Siegel 

[Harper’s Magazine]

Eyes Wide Shut is one of the most moving, playful, and complex movies I have ever seen.  I love the way Stanley Kubrick expresses the film’s theme of social and psychological doubleness through a double entendre in the film’s very title—Eyes Wide Shut—and through his choice, for the title song, of a waltz by Dmitry Shostakovich, a guileful composer famous for writing music whose subtle motifs seemed to celebrate Stalin but actually undermined him. I love the film’s spare, almost allegorical portrait of the tension and complexity at the heart of a marriage. So imagine my alarm when, picking up one magazine and newspaper after another, I read reviews calling Kubrick’s film a disaster and a titanic error, trite and self-important, one of the worst movies the critics had ever seen.

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EYES WIDE SHUT: ALL EYES ON THEM 

Review by Richard Schickel

History and horror, crime and war, sci-fi and sexual transgression. He may have made only 13 feature films in the course of his 46-year career, but Stanley Kubrick covered a range that more prolific filmmakers might—and often did—envy. But whether the films were set in the deep past or the near future, whether their prevailing tone was comic or violent, sly or brutish, weary or idealistic, Kubrick really made the same movie over and over again—vivid, brilliant, emotionally unforgiving, imagistically unforgettable variations on the theme that preoccupied him all his mature life.

Eyes Wide Shut / Stanley Kubrick’s Final Masterpiece

Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick’s Final Masterpiece

Eyes Wide Shut is one of Stanley Kubrick’s last great masterpiece, and personally one of my favorite Kubrick films. Many critics and Kubrick fans considered it one of his lesser works when it was released. But as the years have gone by Eyes Wide Shut has aged extremely well. Even legendary director Martin Scorsese considers the film not only one of Kubrick’s best but on of the best films of the 90’s.

The film is an erotic drama film released in 1999 deriving its roots from a 1926 novella – Traumnovelle (Dream Story) written by Arthur Schnitzler. It was the last film to be directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick as the famous producer died four days after he showed his final cut of the movie to Warner Bros Pictures and four months before the eventual release of the film.

Kubrick’s record-breaking production schedule for Eyes Wide Shut (400 production days) garnered the Guinness World Records award for the longest continuous film shoot in history. It earned over $30 million during its first week of release, and that made it take the box office’s number one spot. Eyes Wide Shut won the Best DVD Collection for Warner Bros at the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films, Saturn Award in 2012.

Why does Nicole Kidman undress in the opening shot of ‘Eyes Wide Shut’?

Stanley Kubrick’s last project Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which features Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise as a well-to-do Manhattan couple whose marriage is in trouble, is a cult work. It had a mixed critical reception on its first release, but since then its reputation as one of the director’s finest works has grown. The film is controversial for many reasons — as much to do with its production and reception as for its supposedly sensational sexual content, heavily hyped by Warner Bros. Like so many Kubrick films, Eyes Wide Shut confounds expectations and tests viewers to the limit. The director was a perfectionist and his attention to detail is legendary; one of the fascinations of his work is the pleasure of unpicking every nuance of image and sound in search of a definitive meaning — a quest destined to be frustrated. This is cinema for obsessive compulsives.

Eyes Wide Shut / Opening scene

Eyes Wide Shut

by Stanley Kubrick 

(1999) 

Opening scene (with Nicole Kidman & Tom Cruise)

Eyes Wide Shut is a 1999 erotic drama film directed, produced, and co-written by Stanley Kubrick.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO7qzwH_RM

Stanley Kubrick / Eyes Without a Face

EYES WITHOUT A FACE

by Charles Whitehouse

The dream interpreter is a kind of detective, and given the orgy of opinion about Eyes Wide Shut currently being enjoyed, let’s use the detective’s dictum and stick to the facts. The most shocking aspect of Eyes Wide Shut is not its long-anticipated sex scenes, but its fidelity to literature. No one expected such a faithful plot adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Novel(Schnitzler was a friend of Freud’s)

Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks: from golden boys to wasted talents

Tom  Cruise and Tom Hanks

Cruise and Hanks: from golden boys to wasted talents

The two Toms are the last 80s superstars still able to open a movie on their name alone. But movies such as Inferno and Jack Reacher confirm their descent into dependability

Nicholas Barber
Thursday 27 October 2016 17.08 BST
S

tatistically speaking, there must be some people who are desperate to see Inferno, the third Ron Howard film to star Tom Hanks as a “symbology” professor who saves the world by misinterpreting paintings. By the same token, some people must be counting the days until they can watch Tom Cruise breaking strangers’ limbs again in Jack Reacher: Never Go Back – an eyebrow-raising subtitle for any sequel. But are these airport-paperback adaptations, both released in October, really the most productive use of their stars’ time? Given that Hanks is now 60 and Cruise is 54 – and that they wouldn’t need any more money if they lived to 1,000 – shouldn’t they be doing something more worthwhile than prolonging a couple of second-rate action franchises?

Of course they should. The fact is, though, that it’s the Toms’ refusal to change a winning formula that makes them such a unique phenomenon. As Michael Douglas drifts towards retirement and Bruce Willis slides into direct-to-DVD purgatory, Cruise and Hanks stand as the only Hollywood megastars who still have their names above the titles of films, year upon year, long after they found fame in the 1980s. They are the last of their kind: the Tom Tom Club.

At the start of 2016, Forbes ranked Cruise as the world’s fourth highest-paid actor, and both Toms apparently offer their employers value for money. In January, a movie-business data analysis site, The Numbers, totted up how much “someone adds in value to the film industry each year”, placing Cruise as the sixth most-bankable person in Hollywood, and Hanks as No 7. The Toms’ onscreen charisma is the most obvious explanation for this Midas touch, of course, but it would be nothing without their uncanny ability to know exactly what audiences want from them, and to deliver it, time and time again. They aren’t just actors, but auteurs. It is the Toms, rather than the directors or writers, who define their films.

Even though Tom H is six years older than Tom C, there are plenty of parallels between them. Both spent their childhoods flitting from school to school. Both had youthful phases of devout Christianity: Cruise planned to be a Catholic priest, and Hanks has said that he was a “Bible-toting evangelical”. Both had their first starring roles in romantic comedies opposite unconventional blonde beauties in the early 1980s: Cruise fell for a prostitute in Risky Business in 1983, Hanks for a mermaid in Splash in 1984. In the 1990s, their wage packets rocketed. Hanks is reported to have made $70m from Forrest Gump in 1994, Cruise made the same amount from Mission: Impossible in 1996. More significantly, both were nominated for Oscars throughout the 1990s, although while Hanks won two, Cruise has yet to pick up any. And both received their most recent Oscar nominations back in the early 00s.

Posters / Misión imposible / Rogue Nation