Stanley Kubrick’s rare praise spotlights an Oscar-nominated short film
stanley kubrick reserved public enthusiasm for films, making his compliments an infrequent occurrence even when he admired individual pictures. Yet he gave an unusually emphatic endorsement to Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett’s 1961 short Very Nice, Very Nice, calling it “the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen. ” The remark reframes the short’s legacy as more than an Oscar-nominated curiosity, highlighting what could cut through Kubrick’s famously selective standards.
Stanley Kubrick and selective praise
The context around Kubrick’s comment matters because it runs against his established pattern. He was not described as someone who routinely “bigged up” movies, whether he had directed them or not, and the portrait here is of a meticulous auteur reluctant to fawn over cinema. The pattern suggests that when a rare, categorical statement appears—especially one framed as the highest in his experience—it functions less like casual admiration and more like a marker of artistic impact.
That scarcity is reinforced by how Kubrick’s preferences are often reconstructed indirectly. The material notes that deciphering Kubrick’s favourite films relies more on comments by people close to him than on statements from Kubrick himself. In that same vein, the fact that he only once submitted a list of his ten favourite movies—in 1963—underscores how unusual it was for him to formally or publicly canonize work. That restraint sets up why a single short film gaining such a definitive quote is newsworthy on its own terms.
Arthur Lipsett’s Very Nice, Very Nice
Lipsett is described as a Canadian filmmaker specializing in the avant-garde, working with the National Film Board of Canada’s Unit B, an offshoot founded to sponsor “new, daring, and culturally relevant shorts” with “unimpeded freedom. ” Very Nice, Very Nice fits that mandate as a 7-minute collage that “ponders the meaning of day-to-day life through images” and asks whether modern living is better than it was three decades earlier. It also carried institutional validation beyond Kubrick’s reaction, earning an Oscar nod for Best Live-Action Short Film.
Kubrick’s wording is particularly specific: he praised the film’s use of “the movie screen and soundtrack. ” The figures point to a response that is not just about theme, but about how images and sound operate together—an evaluation rooted in craft rather than a broad statement of taste. In a story that emphasizes Kubrick’s reluctance to hand out superlatives, the directness of that craft-focused compliment elevates Lipsett’s short as a technical and formal achievement, not simply an intriguing idea executed briefly.
George Lucas and Unit B’s influence
The same Unit B ecosystem is presented as having attracted other notable admirers. George Lucas is cited describing Lipsett’s 1963 short 21-97 as “the kind of movie I wanted to make; a very off-the-wall, abstract kind of film. ” The context also notes a tension between Lucas’s stated interest in abstraction and the movies he ultimately made, while still framing him as “the creator of Star Wars” who “upended the established order and changed Hollywood forever. ”
Put together, the connections to both Kubrick and Lucas suggest Unit B functioned as a kind of creative pressure chamber: an institutional setting designed for experimentation that nonetheless resonated with filmmakers known for reshaping mainstream cinema in very different ways. Still, the clearest, confirmed takeaway remains Kubrick’s reaction to Very Nice, Very Nice. For stanley kubrick to describe any work as the most imaginative and brilliant he had ever seen on screen and soundtrack implies a threshold-crossing moment—one where a 7-minute short accomplished what few could “in two hours, ” as the text frames it.
What the context leaves open is whether Kubrick made similar public statements about other films after 1963, beyond the general note that he became increasingly selective with praise. If that selectivity held, the data suggests Lipsett’s short retains its distinctive status precisely because the record contains so few comparably definitive endorsements from Kubrick himself.
