Lolita

Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged British novelist who is both appalled by and attracted to the vulgarity of American culture. When he comes to stay at the boarding house run by Charlotte Haze, he soon becomes obsessed with Lolita, the woman's teenaged daughter.

Kubrick's adaptation divided critics on release — some found it a genuinely daring comedic achievement, others felt the film's defanging of Nabokov's eroticism left it shapeless and oddly toothless — but the film has grown considerably in critical esteem over the decades. The central tension then and now is whether Kubrick's pivot toward dark comedy compensates for what he couldn't or wouldn't show, with Sellers's performance and Mason's obsession as the main evidence on both sides.