So, Kubrick.

Is there anything left to say about the films of Stanley Kubrick when you’ve been writing about them for your entire career? On the evidence of Criterion’s stunningly curated omnibus collection The Complete Kubrick, the answer is: Yes, absolutely.

As I said when the set came out a couple of weeks back, I wasn’t sure such a project would be as essential as Criterion’s marketing insisted; nearly all of Kubrick’s features had already been released in 4K over the last decade – all but Lolita, in fact – and its $600 USD price tag seemed like a lot to ask of collectors who’d already spent that much on the earlier editions … and the Blu-rays before them, and the DVD sets before those, and maybe also the LaserDiscs. But of course that didn’t matter; these are the Criterion releases of those films, freshly re-encoded from the UHD restorations. Or, in the case of Lolita, restored in 4K for the very first time.

Criterion’s previous editions of Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love the Bomb, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut are all here, their supplements ported over and combined with other features produced by Warner for 2001 and Universal for Spartacus – titles that Criterion had only ever released on LaserDisc and DVD, respectively.

Criterion has similarly expanded and enhanced Warner’s previous releases of Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Full Metal Jacket with new and previously unreleased material, most impressively James Mason and Sue Lyon’s Lolita screen tests. Kubrick’s early shorts Day of the Fight, Flying Padre and The Seafarers are all here as well, in new 4K restorations, along with his long-suppressed first feature Fear and Desire.

Commissioned specifically for this set is a conversation between Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Wynter about Kubrick as an interpreter of literary works – that’s included in the supplements for Lolita, the film where Kubrick first began to impose his own perspective on the material he was adapting – and new commentaries for 2001 and the international cut of The Shining by authors Michael Benson and Lee Unkrich, respectively. (And yes, that’s the same Lee Unkrich who’s been making movies at Pixar for thirty-plus years.) There’s also a newly expanded version of Howard Berry’s short documentary Staircases to Nowhere: Making the Shining, which joins a fresh restoration of Vivian Kubrick’s “The Making of The Shining” on the Blu-ray of the theatrical cut.

The set’s thirty 4K and Blu-ray discs are collected in an oversized file folder which is stuffed with replicas of Kubrick’s notes, photos and sketches. The folder is packaged in its own Kubrick simulacrum, a replica of the bespoke file boxes Kubrick commissioned from a British packaging company for his archives decades ago. Jon Ronson made a documentary about them in 2005, Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, which was included on a bonus DVD with Warner’s Full Metal Jacket Blu-ray but left out of the 4K release. It’s here as well, upgraded to 1080p.

I cannot stress this enough: Every single goddamn thing here looks great. Criterion’s even waived its unofficial no-HDR policy on black-and-white titles, mastering them in both HDR and Dolby Vision. (Even Sony’s 4K release of Strangelove only offered HDR10.) The re-encoding makes for some subtle but clear improvements – 2001 and Full Metal Jacket seem slightly sharper to my eye, and A Clockwork Orange looks just a little bit bleaker in the first act.

It’s possible such tweaks are corrections to earlier “fixes” mandated by the late Leon Vitali, who was tireless in his protection of “what Stanley would have wanted” but also, um, not exactly consistent about any of those things. I suspect that’s why Criterion’s restoration of Eyes Wide Shut is the first home-media release to approximate the off-puttingly bright and grainy look of the 35mm release prints: It’s not that previous DVDs and Blu-ray masters couldn’t have done so, but that they weren’t allowed to.

And speaking of The Shining: Yes, the international cut – never before available in North America, and generally supplanted by the 144-minute North American cut on DVD and Blu-ray everywhere else – turns out to be an essential element of Kubrick’s canon. Running a brisk 119 minutes, the shorter cut plays as a far more jarring and urgent take on the material, getting the Torrance family into the isolated, empty Overlook a lot faster and shifting the focus to Wendy, which lets Shelley Duvall’s performance evolve more naturally into the final act’s panicked breakdown.

The reductions are elegant and efficient, shifting the revelations of Jack’s history of alcoholism and Danny’s delicate psychology to much later in the film, when they can be introduced to greater effect. In this cut, we don’t learn Jack was a violent drunk who only got sober after he broke Danny’s arm until it comes up in conversation with the Overlook’s ghostly bartender Lloyd, which makes Jack Nicholson’s performance even more unsettling. Jack Torrance isn’t a twitchy author; he’s a family annihilator looking for someone to give him the green light. And the leering, capering Jack we see in the third act no longer strikes me as an actor going over the top, but a performance that understands Jack Torrance from the inside out: He’s been thinking about killing his family for a really long time, and he’s enjoying himself.

Kubrick wasn’t afraid to kill his darlings, either: I didn’t even realize the “Danny isn’t here, Mrs. Torrance” moment had been excised until hours after I took the disc out of the player. I don’t know if this cut of The Shining is a better execution of Kubrick’s vision, exactly, but it certainly makes you think about that vision in a way I hadn’t in a really long time. So, yeah. You kinda need to see it, and once you do you should revisit it with Unkrich’s commentary, which is both rich in its detail and inviting in its tone, asking us to come just a little further into the Overlook and learn something new. It’s okay, he’ll make sure you get back out.

Both versions of The Shining look exceptionally good, each cut getting its own pair of 4K and Blu-ray discs to maximize their bitrates. Of course that persists through every title in the set, with the UHD discs devoted to giving the image and sound every bit of available space, adding only menus and any commentary tracks that might accompany the feature. Kubrick’s preference for monaural audio is also respected throughout, though remixed 5.1 surround tracks are also included on everything from 2001 onward and Spartacus has the 7.1 mix produced for its 1991 restoration. To muddle things even further, 2001 also includes the 5.1 mix produced for its original 70mm engagement in 1968.

The supplements can be found on a given title’s companion Blu-ray – or, in the case of 2001, Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut, on a second BD so the 1080p versions of those films can be encoded at the maximum possible bitrate. And there’s a final platter of extras, including Warner’s 2001 documentary Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (directed by the auteur’s brother-in-law and longtime producer Jan Harlan) and Gregory Monro’s 2020 archival project Kubrick by Kubrick, to bring the collection in at a nice round number.

It is an incredible achievement, and one that gets even more impressive when one reads about how much work the archivist and producer Michael Chaiken put into it, and how little time he had to do so. It is, in a word, essential.

The box is sold out at Criterion’s website, but still in stock at Barnes & Noble in the US and the Cinema Cellar in Canada, as well as a number of other retailers, including Toronto’s Bay Street Video. And we’re getting pretty close to the “surprise” kickoff of Barnes & Noble’s semi-annual 50% off Criterion sale, which Cinema Cellar has mirrored in the past. So keep an eye out for deals, or put it on your wish list for the holidays.

The Complete Kubrick is now available in a 4K/Blu-ray combo set from the Criterion Collection. I’m sorry, and you’re welcome.

Up next: Warner brings Gone with the Wind and Ryan’s Daughter to UHD in new special editions, and The End of Oak Street stomps onto disc. But first there’s an even bigger lizard to talk about in tomorrow’s What’s Worth Watching column for paid subscribers … so maybe you want to upgrade your subscription to catch that? Seems like a good idea to me.