10 Movies You Have To Watch AGAIN To Fully Understand

Stanley Kubrick was not known for spoon-feeding his audiences, and while any number of his films (not least 2001) could have been included in this article, it is The Shining that offers the most to sink our teeth into on a second viewing.

Jack Torrance takes his wife and son for a seasonal caretaker job at the isolated Overlook Hotel, which was coincidentally built on an Indian burial ground. As with many Stephen King protagonists, Jack is a budding novelist and spends much of the time alone, trying to get to grips with a story that won't seem to write itself, all the while being driven mad by the apparitions of the Overlook itself.

The final shot - of a photograph of Jack in the Overlook's ballroom in 1921 - is actually a primer for the rest of the film, and so invites us to take another trip through with a slightly altered critical eye and sharper ear, allowing us to tune into many of the details that might have gone unnoticed or were discarded out of hand during that first watch - the Overlook's spectral staff's familiarity with Jack, for instance; or the foreshadowing of deaths and colour-coding of sanity.

Ideas of reincarnation, predestination and the malevolent energy of the dead are rife throughout The Shining, but it is ultimately for the viewer to determine which path to take when seeking to fully understand all it has to offer.