Verdict: A must-see only for die-hard Stanley Kubrick fans.

Details: Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language and drug-related material. 2 hours, 35 minutes.

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Review: The rumors about the content of "Eyes Wide Shut" — Tom Cruise's character wearing a dress, Nicole Kidman's battling heroin addiction, whispers of necrophilia and hot sex scenes for the married stars — turn out to be more interesting than anything in the actual movie.

In his final feature, the late Stanley Kubrick tries to translate a slim 19th-century psychosexual novella by Vienna's Arthur Schnitzler to late-millennial Manhattan. The muffled result feels stranded between time periods, a musty defense-of-marriage pamphlet decked out in titillating 1990s garb.

"Eyes" starts in eye-grabbing fashion, as Kidman appears onscreen, undressing. The opening minutes include some of the filmmaker's exhilarating trademarks: elegant tracking shots through an uptown New York apartment and a scene set in a bathroom (one of his prankish signatures).

We meet Dr. Bill Harford (Cruise) and his wife, Alice (Kidman), as they're preparing for a lavish Christmas party hosted by a patient, Victor Ziegler (Sydney Pollack). The movie hits the first of many false notes at the fete, when a Hungarian Lothario hits on Kidman like a second-rate soap opera actor. He's the sort of Eurotrash that a sophisticated woman like Alice would laugh off the dance floor; instead, she swoons.

The encounter leads to the film's best scene: a late-night discussion between Bill and Alice about fidelity and temptation, resulting in her confession of unexpected, lustful thoughts for a stranger the prior year. The news sparks jealous fantasies in Bill and sends him out on a tentative sexual quest that tests his marriage.

That's when the movie starts to fall apart. What begins as an intriguing study of sexual obsession (because the brain is the largest human sex organ) becomes a veiled sermon against sex, decked out as a paranoid thriller. It's split in two by contradictory urges: toward prurience but also toward prudishness.

As Bill flirts with the idea of infidelity, the movie wants him (and us) to revel in lewd thoughts, but then punishes him for it. In its way, the film is like the scientists in Kubrick's "A Clockwork Orange," trying to "de-program" drood Alex by forcing him to watch violent and sexual images.

"Eyes" hits both its climax and low point at a masquerade party/orgy. Kubrick shoots a sequence of topless, masked beauties engaged in dull, arty choreography with a masked ringmaster waving incense. It's like a Cirque du Soleil routine as performed by cast members of "Showgirls." (That Kubrick agreed to let the party's more explicit sexual footage be masked for American audiences by digitized cloaked figures further diminishes the impact of the sequence; whatever libertine images Dr. Bill is absorbing we can barely glimpse.)

From this point on, "Eyes" presents sexuality in truly 19th-century fashion: as the province of an elite, kinky cabal that rules Manhattan, like the next-door witches of "Rosemary's Baby." When HIV is mentioned late in the film, it's jarring because such a modern medical reference seems out of keeping with the movie's baroque insularity. The last hour pushes Cruise around the streets of New York (actually, London and Pinewood Studios), pursued by suspicions of conspiracy and also by a big, bald thug. Kubrick fans can at least savor some visual echoes of his other films; nonfans will likely have their eyes bored shut.

Though she gets second billing, Kidman is shunted aside for most of the movie's 155-minute running time. She pushes a little hard in her tipsy scenes, but she's very fine in her crucial monologue. Most of the cast — including Rade Sherbedgia as a costume shop owner, Leelee Sobieski as his "Lolita"-like daughter and Marie Richardson as a patient's daughter — are relegated to virtual walk-on status. At least Alan Cumming as a flirtatious desk clerk injects some manic life into the picture. Like many of Kubrick's actors, Cruise is required mainly to react, to be a human presence that's of secondary importance to the camera movement and the tone of dread.

By the end of "Eyes Wide Shut," Kubrick's famous, chilly perfectionism begins to feels less like artistic control than a punitive decision to withhold any real emotion or thrill from the audience. The movie starts off with fascinating ideas, including the boundaries that divide reality from dreams and lustful fantasies from actual sexual transgression. But as it rambles on, it makes less and less of the material, rather than more.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service

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