The Shining

(1980; screens Saturday at 10 p.m.)

Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's horror-pulp novel is a puzzle. As the blocked writer who takes a job as winter caretaker at a cavernous resort hotel with wife Shelley Duvall and son, Jack Nicholson acts ga-ga from the start; you can't tell whether he's going crazy or whether the hotel is haunted by real ghosts. Then, halfway through, Kubrick gives the answer away and all the tension goes out of the movie. Maybe the director is sending up the very horror conventions he seems to be mishandling?