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Eyes Wide Shut: The remarkable afterlife of a notorious 1990s misfire

Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut was poorly received. But 25 years on, it's been reappraised as a classic and endlessly theorised over.

Resonating strongly with recent real-life examples of elite degeneracy – notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was the "living embodiment of" the shadowy Ziegler, according to new biography Kubrick: An Odyssey – it has subsequently sparked fervent online conspiracy theories about the Hollywood sins the auteur was allegedly trying to expose. A famous perfectionist, Kubrick re-created New York City at London's Pinewood Studios (including a reference to a Jewish bagel shop he once visited as a young man) and made an exhausted Tom Cruise walk through doors hundreds of times until the shot was just right. Some believe the dense The Shining is littered with references to the holocaust and genocide of Native Americans (theories explored in the excellent 2012 documentary Room 237), while the ending of Kubrick's magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, has been interpreted as everything from man evolving into a new form (or the Übermensch as Nietzsche put it) to the confirmation of a God.

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