A new DVD review from The Movie Snob.
Paths of Glory (A-). Now I’ve notched eight of Stanley Kubrick’s fourteen movies by watching this 1957 release on the Criterion Collection DVD, and the disc was well worth the investment. As my late colleague Roger Ebert wrote in The Great Movies III, this “was the film by which Stanley Kubrick entered the ranks of great directors, never to leave them.” It’s a simple yet horrifying story, economically told in 88 black-and-white minutes. Two years into the trench-warfare stalemate of World War I, two corrupt French generals order a suicidal assault on a fortified German position. When the attack inevitably fails, one of the generals orders that three surviving soldiers must be court-martialed for cowardice and executed—and he doesn’t care who they are or whether they are guilty. Kirk Douglas (Spartacus) turns in a fine and passionate performance as the colonel who dutifully leads the doomed assault and then serves as defense counsel to the doomed men in their farce of a court-martial trial. It’s a really exceptional film—look it up! And check out my reviews of the other Kubrick films I have seen and reviewed: 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Dr. Strangelove, Lolita, The Shining, and Spartacus. (I saw but never got around to reviewing Eyes Wide Shut. I didn’t like it, even though it featured the divine Nicole Kidman.)
The Movie Court 