text: Lee Siegel from Harper's felt that most critics responded mainly to the marketing campaign and did not address the film on its own terms. Others felt that American censorship took an esoteric film and made it even harder to understand. In his article "Grotesque Caricature", published in Postmodern Culture, Stefan Mattesich praises the film's nuanced caricatured elements, and states that the film's negation of conventional narrative elements is what resulted in its subsequent negative reception.
  For the introduction to Michel Ciment's Kubrick: The Definitive Edition, Martin Scorsese wrote: "When Eyes Wide Shut came out a few months after Stanley Kubrick's death in 1999, it was severely misunderstood, which came as no surprise. If you go back and look at the contemporary reactions to any Kubrick picture (except the earliest ones), you'll see that all his films were initially misunderstood. Then, after five or ten years came the realization that 2001 or Barry Lyndon or The Shining was like nothing else before or since." In 2012, Slant Magazine ranked the film as the second greatest of the 1990s. The British Film Institute ranked the film at No. 19 on its list of "90 great films of the 1990s". In 2022, IndieWire named the film the best movie of the 1990s. The film was listed at number 61 in the BBC's list of the 100 greatest American films of all time.
  Awards and honors
  Controversies
  Debate over the film's state of completion