With Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, this was the movie that stirred up the “film generation” of the late 60s, spreading the idea that movies had at last become an art form at precisely the moment when (it now appears in retrospect) the most fertile period of American filmmaking was coming to an end. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film (made in England) is fascinated by the technology of movies as much as by the technology of space—it presents film as a fabulous, exciting plaything, reviving Orson Welles’s observation that a movie set is “the biggest electric train set a boy ever had.” It was a freshening attitude then, though its long-term effects haven’t been all to the good.
2001: A Space Odyssey
G • 2 hours 19 min • 1968