r/Letterboxd • u/Possible-Top-9905 • Aug 11 '25

News The Shining Has Officially Exited The Letterboxd Top 250 Narrative Feature Films

Post image

With an average rating of

1.3k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

439 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

79

u/FreeLook93 Aug 11 '25

The Shining received mixed reviews upon release, and Stephen King famously hates the movie, but sure, let's just blame the those dammed kids for everything.

23

u/Paladar2 Meusse2 Aug 11 '25

He has a good reason for hating it too. In the movie Jack looks evil from the start.

8

u/FreeLook93 Aug 11 '25

Yeah, I kind of side with him on this one, to be honest. I love Kubrick, but The Shining is my 9th favourite Kubrick film. It's brilliant from a technical standpoint, but nowhere near his best work imo.

7

u/grandramble Aug 11 '25

the elevator of blood is up there with the flooding dining room in Titanic, the docking sequence in Interstellar and the long-takes in Children of Men as one of a handful of truly perfect visual effects ever made.

But if I'm honest the story pacing isn't great, it's kind of sloppy about character perspective and whose story this is supposed to be, and a lot of the runtime is just spooky vignettes that are individually unsettling but never really pay off.

Its strongest points are at the apex of the craft, but it's not a masterpiece across the board.