Full Metal Jacket - Nascido Para Matar

There is a real fear at the heart of this monstrously armored, desperately defensive film.

It's a great piece of filmmaking, diminished only by a second act that fails to live up to the first act of the Marines in training.

If his considerable achievement in this long- awaited film falls short of his Olympian standards, there is a reason that ought to give Kubrick some satisfaction. The world has caught up with Kubrick and what he has to say.

Visually poetic, darkly humorous, uncompromisingly brutal, and subversive in every way, Full Metal Jacket is easily one of the best war movies without being remotely similar to your standard issue war flick.

Somehow after the decadence of Barry Lyndon and a philosophical look at horror in The Shining, Stanley Kubrick settled into a film of unrestrained vitriol and aggression.

The most horrifying moments of Full Metal Jacket are those in which the young Americans gladly assist in their own damnation.

Full Metal Jacket seems further proof that Kubrick is still trapped in self-pleasing cinematic exercise.

[Kubrick's] genius, and perhaps burden, is to see the insanity in us all and to make it seem so terrifyingly normal.

It may seem too spare, too clinical, its moments of war even too familiar for some. But, aiming for minds as well as hearts, Kubrick hits his target squarely.

What gives this story its power is not really its originality, but the relentlessness of Kubrick's black-comic vision and the tightness of his focus.

Full Metal Jacket is not a realistic film -- it is horror-comic superrealism, from a God's-eye view -- but it should fully engage the ordinary movie grunt.

This is the most tightly crafted Kubrick film since Dr. Strangelove, as well as the most horrific; the first section alone accomplishes most of what The Shining failed to do.

An intense, schematic, superbly made Vietnam War drama.

The film's most gut-wrenching horrors occur in the first half, thanks to the regimens imposed by real-life drill instructor Lee Ermey.

Although the elements of the story are simple and precise, Kubrick infuses a dreamlike, fatalistic quality.

No one who sees Full Metal Jacket will easily put the film's last glimpse of D'Onofrio, or a great many other things about Kubrick's latest and most sobering vision, out of mind.

Full Metal Jacket, ice and wildfire, order and chaos, is intellectual war, hard thought.

Kubrick's harrowing, beautiful and characteristically eccentric new film about Vietnam, is going to puzzle, anger and (I hope) fascinate audiences as much as any film he has made to date.

Kubrick is trying to make a movie about madness and chaos, but he won't give in to the chaos.

[A] strangely shapeless film from the man whose work usually imposes a ferociously consistent vision on his material.