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
Nicole Kidman beauty with, it seems, a sense of humor". The following year, she and Cruise re-teamed for Ron Howard's Irish epic "Far and Away" (1992), which was a modest critical and commercial success. In 1993, she starred in the thriller "Malice" opposite Alec Baldwin and the drama "My Life" opposite Michael Keaton. In 1995, Kidman appeared in her highest-grossing live-action film (as of 2018), playing Dr. Chase Meridian, the damsel in distress, in the superhero film "Batman Forever", opposite Val Kilmer as the film's title character. The same year Kidman starred in Gus Van Sant's critically acclaimed dark comedy "To Die