KUBRICK

(1968); “A Clockwork Orange” (19 71) ; “Barry Lyndon” (1975); “The Shining” (1980); “Full Metal Jacket” (1987); and “Eyes Wide Shut,” which was released shortly after his death in 1999.

Mikics is an adept student of Kubrick’s uncanny art. “His movies are about mastery that fails,” he writes. “Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents, or hijacked by masculine rage.” He unpeels the way that Kubrick’s movies — packed as they are with impieties — challenge, infuriate and entertain.

Writing about Tom Cruise’s awkward performance in “Eyes Wide Shut,” he reminds us what clicks about it: “Inner torment is never glamorous or sexy in a Kubrick movie. Instead it feels like a malfunction.” He notes that Kubrick, while dreaming up a possible cast many years before actually filming, considered Bill Murray for the role.

Mikics has a flair for nailing a performance. In a scene from “Lolita,” Sue Lyon is “a bratty virtuoso of gum-chewing, her eyes shooting darts of disdain.” Here he is on Malcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange”: “He has killer style: jaunty and sharp in his Chaplinesque bowler, a buoyant boychik who will never realize how dumb he is.”

This book’s subtitle notwithstanding, Kubrick was in many ways the least American of American directors. He spent much of his adult life in the English countryside, an hour outside London. It was cheaper to make movies there, and he hated to fly.

He stayed in touch with America. He liked gossip — “character analysis,” Elizabeth Hardwick called it — and was always on the telephone to Los Angeles. He had videotapes of pro football games sent to him. (He admired the editing of Michelob commercials.) He read The New York Times every morning. When bored during a movie, he was known to open a newspaper in a theater.

This book captures his control-freak side. It also captures why people wanted to work with him. He had a feel for every aspect of what made a film work.

His voracious reading served him well. “I literally go into bookstores, close my eyes and take things off the shelf,” he told one interviewer. “If I don’t like the book after a bit, I don’t finish it. But I like to be surprised.”

His movies may lower the temperature in a room, but Mikics pushes back against the notion that frosty is all they are. Kubrick created some of the most indelible images in cinema. Mikics quotes music critic Alex Ross, who wrote about Kubrick’s movies: “They make me happy, they make me laugh,” Ross said. “If this was cold, then so was Fred Astaire.”

Here are the Publishers Weekly bestsellers for the week that ended Aug. 22, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide. (Tribune News Service)