A Clockwork Orange

Stanley Kubrick followed up his huge success with 2001: A Space Odyssey with a markedly different vision of the near-future: an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' notorious novel, set in a London where gangs of teenage "droogs" rob, rape, and kill with abandon while an iron-fisted state practices its own form of violence through regimentation and brainwashing. When vicious and erudite droog Alex (Malcolm McDowell) is sentenced to prison after committing a brutal murder, he willingly becomes a guinea pig in an experiment designed to purge him of his violent impulses; eventually "cured" and released, he soon finds that the society he returns to is as vicious in its own way as his own free-spirited carnage. Assailed at the time for its supposed glorification of violence, A Clockwork Orange is now regarded as one of cinema's definitive imaginings of a dystopian future.