The Shining

"(Kubrick) manages to make his movie thoroughly unnerving by keeping the horror so close to home."

"The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them."

"Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King's bestseller."

"Deeply scary and strange."

"Essential viewing. Prepare to be disturbed."

"The classic Stanley Kubrick film isn't just scary - it is also, in its own odd way, defined by a hopeful perspective on life and death."

"A masterpiece."

"The incredibly slack narrative line forestalls suspense."

"Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions... and also makes you jump."

"It's the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror."

"Kubrick has made a movie that will have to be reckoned with on the highest level."

"Kubrick doesn't dumb it down or anything, but he's not actively trying to appeal only to film connoisseurs either. If any of his movies could be called mainstream, it's this one."

"Its artful ambiguities are immersive. Check in."

"I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie."

"Boy will it chill your blood."