Room 237

Directed by Rodney Ascher

(Not rated)

****

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Room 237 is destined to go down as “one of the great movies about movies,” said Rob Nelson in Variety. A 2012 festival favorite that has just hit theaters and become available in video on demand, it begins as a study of the hidden messages in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and becomes a “hugely entertaining” study of human obsession. As five self-appointed theorists lay out their competing interpretations, director Rodney Ascher “shrewdly” chooses to keep their faces off the screen, said Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. We instead see nonstop footage from Kubrick’s 1980 horror classic about a writer going mad in an empty hotel, while voiceovers explain why the film is really about the Holocaust or the genocide of American Indians, or even that it’s Kubrick’s veiled confession that he faked the Apollo moon landings for NASA. Room 237 is “insightful, funny, and formally inventive,” said Chuck Klosterman in Grantland.com. But it also illuminates how viewers’ rabid beliefs can make a complex film more important, and more “uncomfortably human,” than it seemed at first glance.