The Shining's reviews
Media reviews
Time Out
A masterpiece
Empire
Ostensibly a haunted house story, it manages to traverse a complex world of incipient madness, spectral murder and supernatural visions ...and also makes you jump.
JoBlo
This movie captures your attention with its grand form and vision, ropes you in with some terror and eccentric direction, and ties you down and stabs you in the heart with its cold-eyed view of the man's mind gone overboard, creepy atmosphere and the loss of humanity.
New York Times
Meticulously detailed and never less than fascinating, The Shining may be the first movie that ever made its audience jump with a title that simply says "Tuesday."
Chicago Sun-Times
Kubrick delivers this uncertainty in a film where the actors themselves vibrate with unease.
Roger Ebert
The movie is not about ghosts but about madness and the energies it sets loose in an isolated situation primed to magnify them.
Time
His adaptation of 'The Shining', Stephen King's pulpy haunted-house novel, keeps forcing reasonable ? or non-occult ? interpretations on the behavior, variously bonkers and bloody, that his camera records with its customary elegance.
The Guardian
If 'The Shining' isn?t trivial, it certainly encourages one to think that it is.
The Washington Post
I can't recall a more elaborately ineffective scare movie.