Lolita

A fascinating if problematic early film from Stanley Kubrick, perhaps the most obsessive of the great auteurs of the 1960s, made just on the cusp of a run of cinematic masterpieces. Here Vladimir Nabakov adapts his own controversial satirical novel about the obsessive love a British middle aged professor develops for a 12-year-old girl. While the novel outraged many bluenoses, the film advances the age of the "nymphet" to about 15 thereby neutralizing much of of the controversy. It's quite long--too long--possibly as a result of having Nabokov do his own screen adaptation. Nabakov's novels are so intensely concerned with language that one would expect that they wo...