Twelve features in fifty years and not a wasted frame in any of them. The most influential filmmaker in the history of post-classical Hollywood.
Stanley Kubrick was a Look magazine photographer before he was a filmmaker. He made his first feature, Fear and Desire, in 1953 at age 25. He moved to England in 1962 for Lolita and never lived in the United States again. He made his last film, Eyes Wide Shut, between 1996 and 1999; he died of a heart attack four days after delivering the final cut.
He made twelve features in fifty years. Each one was the most demanding production in the industry that year. He was famous for shooting take counts that ran into the hundreds (Shelley Duvall reportedly endured 127 takes of a single Shining scene), for refusing to fly so all his locations had to come to England, for personally overseeing every detail of every release print sent to every territory.
His influence on subsequent filmmakers is total. There is no major director working today who hasn't been shaped by Kubrick. Christopher Nolan has spoken about him as the primary influence on Interstellar; Wes Anderson's symmetrical compositions are Kubrick by way of Hal Ashby; David Fincher's take-count obsession is a direct inheritance.
Kubrick's compositions tend to centre a vanishing point and align the frame around it. The corridor in The Shining. The trenches in Paths of Glory. The bedroom in A Clockwork Orange. The technique creates an immediate sense of formal order — and Kubrick uses that order against the audience, because the order is invariably about to break.
It's the most recognisable visual signature in cinema, and it's the one most often imitated.
Kubrick popularised the use of pre-existing classical music against modern imagery. The Blue Danube in 2001. Ode to Joy in A Clockwork Orange. Wendy Carlos's Moog reinterpretations of Beethoven. He preferred the texture and historical weight of classical music to commissioned scores, and the contrast between baroque or Romantic music and modern action produces an emotional effect no original score quite achieves.
Almost every prestige film today that uses a classical piece against a modern scene is quoting Kubrick, sometimes without knowing it.
Kubrick's films are accused, fairly, of being cold. The compositions are precise; the performances are often hyper-controlled; the camera moves with mechanical deliberation. What that formal coldness allows is a level of moral severity that warmer filmmaking would dilute. The end of Dr. Strangelove. The Korova Milkbar in A Clockwork Orange. The hotel maze in The Shining. The moral content is hot. The form makes you watch it.
Kubrick described his goal as 'to film what could not be filmed'. Most of his career was a series of attempts to find the visual grammar for things that didn't have one — for the experience of psychedelic enlightenment (2001), for ultraviolence (A Clockwork Orange), for nuclear annihilation (Dr. Strangelove).
If you've never watched a Kubrick film:
Max Ophüls, Sergei Eisenstein, Akira Kurosawa, the British documentary movement, his own background as a still photographer. Kubrick's influence on subsequent directors — Spielberg, Nolan, Anderson, Fincher, Villeneuve, Aronofsky, the Coens — is so broad it almost stops being a distinguishing fact about a director.