The Shining

Kubrick's dizzyingly claustrophobic horror classic. Jack Torrance takes a job as caretaker at The Overlook Hotel, which he is to look after during the winter season when it is closed. Before leaving, management asks him whether he can handle such prolonged isolation. Jack shrugs off the warning and sees the job as a perfect opportunity to finally get the peace to write the novel he has had inside him for so long, and sets off with his wife and their young son. But a snowstorm leaves the little family completely cut off from the outside world. The plot of The Shining moves somewhere in the borderland between dream and reality. Kubrick's visualization of Jack's accelerating madness is expressed through fantastic cinematography: the camera glides silkily through the hotel's endless, identical corridors, its enormous kitchen and lavish ballrooms, making the people small in the overwhelming surroundings. Jack Nicholson delivers one of his greatest performances as Jack Torrance, who desperately tries to fight the nature around him, but gradually loses control over his own.