Coming Soon
LOLITA
1962
Director
Stanley Kubrick
Starring
James Mason
Shelley Winters
Peter Sellers
Sue Lyon
Runtime
152 minutes
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The first, and greatest, adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s troubling 1955 novel still possesses a strange and unnerving power. After taking a room to let with a single mother (Shelley Winters), Prof. Humbert Humbert (James Mason) falls inappropriately in love and lust with her young teenage daughter Lolita (Sue Lyon). Lolita teases and takes advantage of his affections with cruelty as their dysfunctional relationship continues throughout the years. Love is never simple.
Kubrick elicits extraordinary performances from his actors in LOLITA, creating powerful emotional impact within ironic distance. Winters gives perhaps the best performance of her career, Mason is impeccable, and Sue Lyon has the “eerie vulgarity” and provocative whine of the novel’s Lolita. But ultimately it is Peter Sellers who gives LOLITA its vitality. More mimic than comic actor, Sellers’ Quilty is the embodiment of Kubrick’s penchant for combining farce and terror, and LOLITA is closest to the spirit of Nabokov’s novel when Sellers is on the screen. Most critics today agree: LOLITA is Kubrick’s most misunderstood and underrated film. It marks the turning point from a naturalistic cinema (THE KILLING, PATHS OF GLORY) to the surrealism of the later films in which reality and fantasy can coexist. It's a film with the weird, distressing power of a half-repressed memory.
Kubrick elicits extraordinary performances from his actors in LOLITA, creating powerful emotional impact within ironic distance. Winters gives perhaps the best performance of her career, Mason is impeccable, and Sue Lyon has the “eerie vulgarity” and provocative whine of the novel’s Lolita. But ultimately it is Peter Sellers who gives LOLITA its vitality. More mimic than comic actor, Sellers’ Quilty is the embodiment of Kubrick’s penchant for combining farce and terror, and LOLITA is closest to the spirit of Nabokov’s novel when Sellers is on the screen. Most critics today agree: LOLITA is Kubrick’s most misunderstood and underrated film. It marks the turning point from a naturalistic cinema (THE KILLING, PATHS OF GLORY) to the surrealism of the later films in which reality and fantasy can coexist. It's a film with the weird, distressing power of a half-repressed memory.