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 of higher education. Later in life, Kubrick spoke disdainfully of his education and of contemporary American schooling as a whole, maintaining that schools were ineffective in stimulating critical thinking and student interest. His father was disappointed in his son's failure to achieve excellence in school, of which he felt Stanley was fully capable. Jack also encouraged Stanley to read from the former's library at home, while at the same time permitting Stanley to take up photography as a serious hobby. While still in high school, Kubrick was chosen as an official school photographer. In the mid-1940s, since he was not