(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Thu 12 March 2026 17:45, UK
Even though people spoke about him in hushed and hagiographic tones, and every superlative under the sun has been tossed at his work by others, Stanley Kubrick wasn’t a fan of bigging up movies.
It didn’t matter if he’d directed them or not; it wasn’t really in his makeup for the meticulous auteur to be caught fawning over any work of cinema. That’s not to say that he didn’t praise individual pictures, because he did, but it would be an understatement to say that it was an infrequent occurrence.
Deciphering Kubrick’s favourite features relies more on comments provided by those close to him than those from the man himself. We know he loathed The Wizard of Oz because his daughter shared that information, we can infer that he considered Eyes Wide Shut his best film because Jan Harlan said it, and it was friends and family who revealed his surprising love of Steve Martin’s The Jerk.
Only once did Kubrick submit a list of his ten favourite movies, and that was in 1963. From that point on, he was increasingly selective in his praise, but certain directors and their pictures earned it when he felt it was deserved. However, there was one Academy Award-nominated outlier.
Arthur Lipsett was a Canadian filmmaker who specialised in the avant-garde, with the National Film Board of Canada’s Unit B giving him the platform to create. The offshoot was founded specifically for sponsoring new, daring, and culturally relevant shorts from aspiring auteurs who could operate with unimpeded freedom, and the group’s work won some notable fans.
George Lucas described Lipsett’s 1963 short, 21-97, as “the kind of movie I wanted to make; a very off-the-wall, abstract kind of film.” Those weren’t the movies he ended up making, not after THX 1138, anyway, but as the creator of Star Wars, he’s still the guy who upended the established order and changed Hollywood forever.
As for Kubrick, he was especially taken with Very Nice, Very Nice. Lipsett’s 1961 effort, a 7-minute exercise in collage that ponders the meaning of day-to-day life through images and asks the question of whether modern living is better than it was three decades ago, earned an Oscar nod for ‘Best Live-Action Short Film’.
For someone who was never too keen on doling out praise, the 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange architect’s appraisal was about as ringing as endorsements get, after he called it “the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen.”
Coming from Kubrick, compliments don’t come much higher, and Lipsett only needed a few minutes to blow the legendary director’s mind, something very few filmmakers could accomplish in two hours.
