The Shining

In need of some peace and quiet, a tightly wound writer (Nicholson) moves his wife (Duvall) and son (Lloyd) to the scenic Overlook Hotel for the winter. But all work and no play makes for an especially nasty case of cabin fever. Stanley Kubrick’s arthouse horror mindbender is the thinking person’s slasher film, crammed with surreal imagery, cryptic symbols, and tantalizing allusions that have inspired a thousand and one interpretations. Duvall’s performance—maligned at the time and Razzie-nominated—now scans as a bravura depiction of anxiety and fear, a key part of the film’s suffocating architecture.