Stanley Kubrick brilliant. Then the film degenerates into a masterpiece." Roger Ebert was not particularly impressed with it, awarding it a mediocre 2.5 out of 4. He concluded: "Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" is more like a book of short stories than a novel", a "strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material". Kubrick's final film was "Eyes Wide Shut" (1999), starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman as a Manhattan couple on a sexual odyssey. Tom Cruise portrays a doctor who witnesses a bizarre masked quasireligious orgiastic ritual at a country mansion, a
Stanley Kubrick tones and don't have to be pounded over the head with plot points and suspense tools." Kubrick was notorious for demanding multiple takes during filming to perfect his art, and his relentless approach was often extremely demanding for his actors. Jack Nicholson remarked that Kubrick would often demand up to fifty takes of a scene. Nicole Kidman explains that the large number of takes he often required stopped actors from consciously thinking about technique, thereby helping them enter a "deeper place". Kubrick's high take ratio was considered by some critics as "irrational", although he firmly believed that actors were at