A Clockwork Orange

(1971; screens Friday at 10 p.m.)

Stanley Kubrick embraces the style but not the moral of Anthony Burgess's apocalyptic novel of a future London run by murderous juvenile delinquents and ruthless bureaucrats; we get off on the ultra-violence, but the film gives us no easy answers or sympathetic characters (certainly not Malcolm McDowell's reptilean Alex) to spare our being implicated in its social indictment. It's a Brechtian gamble that only partly succeeds -- too often the film takes on the look of a cartoon rather than a nightmare.