A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange opened in 1971 and was nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay — losing all four to The French Connection. The film became immediately the most controversial of Kubrick's career: he eventually withdrew it from British distribution himself in 1973 after copy-cat violence and personal threats, a withdrawal that lasted until his death in 1999. Adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, the film established the Nadsat slang and the visual register that has shaped dystopian cinema since.

Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell, in his career-defining role) leads his three droogs — Pete, Georgie, Dim — through a night of beating, raping and stealing in a near-future Britain governed by lethargic bureaucracy. Kubrick adapted Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel himself, retaining the Nadsat slang as a structural device and casting McDowell partly on the strength of his work in Lindsay Anderson's If..... Burgess himself spent his later years uneasy with the book's reception and with Kubrick's film, eventually arguing that the novel's twenty-first chapter — omitted from American editions — had been essential to its meaning.

Kubrick's collaboration with composer Wendy Carlos, including the synthesised re-orchestration of Beethoven's Ninth and Rossini's Thieving Magpie, produced one of the most influential film scores of the 1970s. After a wave of copy-cat violence and personal threats to his family, Kubrick himself withdrew the film from British distribution in 1973 — an unprecedented self-imposed ban that lasted until his death in 1999. The film sits permanently in the Sight & Sound poll's upper tiers and remains a continuing touchstone in academic debates about screen violence and authorial responsibility.