Actor

Jack Nicholson

4: briefs
13:00: average
52 min: in total

On film.briefs4

Carnal Knowledge

Mike Nichols · 1971

Mike Nichols’ 1971 Carnal Knowledge follows two men across twenty-five years as their relationships with women deteriorate not through crisis but through repetition, habit, and emotional default. Adapted from Jules Feiffer’s play, it uses flat lighting, restrained performances, and unadorned editing to chart how language, routine and performance replace intimacy. Starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel, Ann-Margret and Candice Bergen, it remains a cold, structurally rigorous study of masculinity and desire — admired for its honesty, challenged for its austerity.

13:00

Chinatown

Roman Polanski · 1974

Chinatown sends Jack Nicholson's private investigator into a municipal water scandal modelled on the early-twentieth-century disputes that built Los Angeles, opposite Faye Dunaway and John Huston. Robert Towne's script won the film's only Oscar from eleven nominations, but the ending that gives the film its reputation was Polanski's, forced through over the writer's objections, and it is worth knowing which parts of the film are whose before deciding what the story is actually arguing.

13:00

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Miloš Forman · 1975

Miloš Forman's adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel puts Jack Nicholson's disruptive new patient against Louise Fletcher's controlled head nurse inside the Oregon State Hospital, an operating psychiatric facility used as the actual set. Made for $3 million after a development history stretching back to 1962, it became one of only three films to sweep the top five Academy Awards, and it still plays as a study of institutional control rather than a simple underdog story.

13:00

The Shining

Stanley Kubrick · 1980

Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel follows a recovering alcoholic, his wife and their clairvoyant son through a winter at an isolated hotel, shot entirely on constructed sets in England on a $19 million budget, built around Jack Nicholson's escalating performance, John Alcott's Steadicam corridors and Wendy Carlos's electronic score.