Lolita

I am the biggest fan of Kubrick but this film is the one film that I felt didn't reach his lofty standards. James Mason is great as usual but Shelley Winters acting is terrible, completely wooden and unrealistic.

Sellers is entertaining as usual but doesn't gel with the story or with Mason. It's as though they are in two completely different films.

It's a decent movie but no classic.

Lolita is a completely unrealistic character who has no emotion at all, and is inviting these older men to take advantage of her. This film could have been a hard hitting classic but unfortunately, seems to condone child abuse by portraying the girl as being not only, consensual but the one who is in control.

Any clown that states Black and White as a negative point makes their review completely redundant. Ignorant Idiot. Imbecile. Wow.

Perhaps it's the Jimmy Saville thing, but there's something too uncomfortably accepting about Kubrick's visually mild paedophile romcom. It would need to be a braver, more disturbing film, to really address the issues, to confront the viewer. I don't think it would need to be visually explicit at all. But it would need to deal more up-front with the man-girl issue. Here, I mostly felt unconfronted by the story, but unhappy with the times and style in which it was made. As a piece of cinema, I thought the filme was spoiled most by the Sellars character, which was too central and badly handled.

Perhaps the Coen Brothers could do this better. But nowadays perhaps we just can't have a 14 year old, let alone 12 year old protagonist. Things got close with Killer Joe's heroine - that was uncomfortable enough. There's plenty of ways in which a story can be told about different kinds of pretatory older males and power-crazed or completely innocent young females who give each other hell, intentionally or otherwise. And the role of observers can be included, as it was, a bit, here. But I didn't like this dated version - we need modern eyes to deal with our modern version of this age-old problem. Also, after this, though I've not read the book, I am not sure I ever really want to.

Stanley Kubrick's milk and water adaptation of Lolita will come as a dissapointment to fans of Vladimir Nabokov's sublimely perverse and wickedly funny novel. The heart and soul of the book is lost in its censor-heavy transfer to the big screen, and Humbert Humbert's lack of a voice sucks all of the substance from the story.

As with this film's successor (Adrian Lyne's 1997 version), Lo is understandably older than the twelve-year-old of the novel. But even this adjustment did not stop the censors from allowing anything more than implied intimacy between Humbert and Haze.

Kubrick's whim of opening the film with the book's climax is misjudged, robbing Lolita first-timers of Quilty's shadowy presence and the novel's ultimate reveal.

Lyne's remake is far more faithful to the novel, and on that basis I would point you in that direction. If you haven't read the book, then I would suggest reading that and forgetting the movies altogether. If you must spend your precious LOVEFILM credits on a Kubrick flick, opt for A Clockwork Orange.