AllMovie

Filmmaker Stanley Kubrick earned a well-deserved reputation as a painstaking perfectionist who was willing to spend years researching a project and devote just as much time to shooting and editing one of his pictures. Given Kubrick's obsessive attitude about work, it should come as no surprise that the man was loathe to throw anything away, and after he died in 1999, Jon Ronson, a documentary filmmaker who corresponded with Kubrick, discovered the late filmmaker had literally hundreds of cardboard boxes stored at his estate that were stuffed with production notes, research documents, memorabilia, photos, fan mail, reviews and other material he had collected over the years. With the permission of Kubrick's family, Ronson began sorting through the reams of paper the director had saved, and Ronson's research led to the film Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, a documentary which offers a glimpse at Kubrick's informal archive and what it reveals about one of the singular cinematic artists of the 20th Century. Stanley Kubrick's Boxes also includes some rare behind-the-scenes footage of the director at work during the production of Full Metal Jacket, shot by his daughter Vivian Kubrick.