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 discovery which later threatens his life. The story is based on Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 Freudian novella "Traumnovelle" ("Dream Story" in English), which Kubrick relocated from turn-of-the-century Vienna to New York City in the 1990s. Kubrick said of the novel: "A difficult book to describe—what good book isn't. It explores the sexual ambivalence of a happy marriage and tries to equate the importance of sexual dreams and might-have-beens with reality. All of Schnitzler's work is psychologically brilliant". Although Kubrick was almost 70, he worked relentlessly for 15 months to get the film out by its planned release date of July 16,