Room 237

Do the Kabbalist readings or wild free associations that Room 237 celebrates improve The Shining? Let's say that they create a parallel text: Lost in the Overlook, in search of the overlooked.

A curious and entertaining documentary.

The human brain is a marvellously suggestible organ.

[A] strange, frustrating, occasionally fascinating doc ...

"Room 237" evolves from an ode to movie love at its most delirious to a wry examination of the crackpot mind at work.

There's enough real evidence supporting the theory that Kubrick was a genius, and that's pretty entertaining all by itself.

Room 237 isn't about The Shining or the Holocaust or the slaughter of Native Americans or the moon landing. It's about people finding order in chaos.

"The Shining" is the perfect launching pad for a movie about obsessive film theorists because Kubrick attracts theories like lint and this film is perhaps his most stubbornly mystifying work.

Don't watch this film and expect an authoritative critical analysis of the film; watch it and explore the distorting, drug-like pull that some art can exert on its audience.

Room 237 is about bringing a text to life through an active, prolonged, playful, or even tortured relationship to it. It's a document of immersive obsession.

Inelegant in the way it assembles all this stuff ... but anyone who's ever obsessed over the subtext of a beloved movie will find it amusing.

An intellectual exercise, and an entertaining one, especially for those who don't want to label The Shining as just a ghost story.