“If you want your art to matter, stay in touch with the world. Keep in the human drama, take walks, go to baseball games, chase women, argue with waiters, ride motorcycles, hang out with children, play poker, visit Paris as often as possible and always keep in touch with the craggy old guy with the bad cough who runs the news stand.

”Kubrick apparently did very little of this. The more invested he became in his secretive, secluded, every-detail-controlled, nothing-left-to-chance lifestyle in England — which he began to construct when he left Hollywood and moved there in the early '60s — and the less familiar he became with the rude hustle-bustle of life on the outside, the more rigid and formalized and apart-from-life his films became.“

--Jeff Wells, from his 2000 review of Stanley Kubrick's ”Eyes Wide Shut,“ recently resurrected on his Hollywood Elsewhere site after rewatching the film on Blu-Ray. He also quotes from David Thomson's review: ”It is a shock to find that the film is only 159 minutes. Every frame feels like a prison."