Following a major Kubrick retrospective at the Cinémathèque in Paris last Spring, this fascinating new documentary, cowritten by Festival guest Michel Ciment, was screened in the Cannes Classics strand of this year’s festival to celebrate the 40th anniversary of A Clockwork Orange. Along with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), it was perhaps one of the most misunderstood and unfairly vilified of films upon its release, and both are now rightly acknowledged as prescient masterpieces. Utilising recent interviews with the cast and Kubrick’s family, alongside recordings of Ciment’s contemporaneous interviews with the director himself, it provides a wealth of background knowledge into the making of the film and the critical reaction to it, and explores the reasons for Kubrick’s decision to withdraw it from U.K. circulation, only revoked upon his death.

(Includes introduction and Q&A with Michel Ciment.)<