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Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Good concept, poorly executed.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

A washed-up boxer, Davey Gordon, falls in love with his neighbour, Gloria Price, a dancer. They plan to leave town but unfortunately, her boss is infatuated with her and is determined that she not leave. He is not above using violence to achieve his aims and Gloria and Davey's lives are soon in danger.Stanley Kubrick's second movie (the first being the unacclaimed "Fear and Desire" of 1953). Written, directed, produced and edited by him, this is a movie of a man still learning the ropes. It's also the movie of a man without fame enough to get a decent budget. The fact that he has so many credits in this movie, especially producer, shows how he had to make do. The lack of a name actor/actress in the cast also shows this, and, to an extent, hurts the movie.Plot is decent, though quite basic. Seems pretty conventional but Kubrick ramps up the action and suspense towards the end, making it a fairly rewarding story in the end. Performances are the weakest aspect, largely due, as mentioned, to the no-name actors. Some pretty hammy performances, though, thankfully, the dialogue is quite limited.What prevents this from being just your average B-grade drama, and probably what ensured that Kubrick still had a career in film, is the cinematography. This is where you can see Kubrick's genius for film (his background was in photography, so not a surprise). Kubrick's camera work carries the movie.Was torn between giving a 6 or a 7. Went with a 7 in the end - the last few scenes kicked it up a notch.

Stanley Kubrick's second film, Killer's Kiss was summed up by one influential critic as an experiment in esoterica. Filmed on a budget of $40,000 (raised by Kubrick's relatives), the 65-minute, black-and-white drama is a true "noir" film, shot mostly at night in a variety of seedy Manhattan locations. The plot concerns the efforts of boxer Jamie Smith (who also narrates the film) to rescue nightclub dancer Irene Kane from the lecherous maneuvers of club owner Frank Silvera. The much-admired climax finds Smith, Silvera, and the villain's henchmen pursuing each other in a warehouse filled with grotesque-looking store mannequins. Director-writer-photographer-editor Kubrick didn't like the happy ending imposed on the film by its distributor (United Artists), but it was a lot more logical and satisfying than the filmmaker's own planned denouement. The imperiled leading lady Irene Kane later became famous as TV commentator and journalist Chris Chase; also appearing in the film is Kubrick's then-wife Ruth Sobotka.

After "Fear and Desire", Kubrick managed to pull off a more professional looking film, although also a less intriguing one. If FaD was poorly written, K'sK stands as a good improvement over it, with leaner lines but still stained by too long expository monologues, especially the less-than-relevant one about Gloria's relatives, which feels more like a showcase of Kubrick's wife as a dancer than a really significant part of the film. While FaD played a lot with the genre it was put in, though, and created an unsettling atmosphere with the doubles of the protagonists, K'sK agrees more to the dictats of the genre, only seldom driving away from it with some romance drama and continuing Kubrick's obsession for the bewilderment of his characters. The cinematography and staging are the true shiners of the film, with amazing shots that are statements for the masterpieces to come: I especially liked the nightmare scene, which clearly relates to the journey through space and time made by Bowman in "2001" (their names, Davey and David, are also very similar...). Acting, like in the previous film, is nothing worth noting, except maybe the fight in the mannequin factory, which was a good showcase of energy and rage by the two mains, especially for a low-budget film. The happy ending got me unprepared for, as I know Kubrick and his love for generating mixed feelings in his viewers, but I later learned that it was imposed by the producers for a lot of money, so I can see now why it is so.All in all, being this his second film and with a low budget, it's still an interesting piece of history in the greatest director of all time's career.

Perhaps the most notable trick that Kubrick pulled off in this fledgling effort was to shoot several sequences in the 'city that never sleeps' and catch it napping. It was so disconcerting to see an almost deserted Times Square followed by first a car journey through totally empty streets and a chase across equally empty roof-tops with not even a distant sound of what had to be heavy traffic below. It was equally clear that Kubrick had dipped heavily into the oeurvre of William Irish/Cornell Woollrich and maybe even watched such low-key adaptations as Phantom Lady and The Window. It was equally clear the film was made for a stick of gum and couldn't run to even mediocre acting talent. It's probably fair to say that if it didn't have the name Kubrick attached it wouldn't have attracted the amount of ink it has. Watchable - barely.