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 its sex scenes. The film received further attention following Kubrick's death shortly before its release. After brief hiatus and a highly publicized divorce from Cruise, Kidman returned to the screen to play a mail-order bride in the British-American drama "Birthday Girl". In 2001, Kidman played the cabaret actress and courtesan Satine in Baz Luhrmann's musical "Moulin Rouge!", opposite Ewan McGregor. Her performance and her singing received positive reviews; Paul Clinton of "CNN.com" called it her best work since "To Die For", and wrote "[she] is smoldering and stunning as Satine. She moves with total confidence throughout the film [...] Kidman