At some unspecified time in Britains future, Alex (McDowell) leads a gang of juvenile delinquents who delight in going on sprees to rape and maim. His delight is greater than anyone else's. He truly loves violence, for its own sake, just as he loves Beethoven. When he's caught by the police he agrees to shorten his sentence by submitting to the "Ludivico treatment": a rough conditioning which will make violence repulsive to him. Afterwards, he can't so much as slap someone's face without getting violently ill. This makes him an easy target for anyone he has ever wronged.

This film caused an enormous controversy on release (the fifth consecutive Kubrick film to do so); whether or not it "goes too far" is hard to say, since it takes a direction nobody else has taken before or since. Visually, the look of the unspecified future is a glorious, over-ripe rendering of 1970s design; so deliberately dated that it hasn't really dated at all. Similarly, the really disturbing thing about the violence is that it's not disturbing - and was never intended to be. The film is not itself a Ludivico treatment. Kubrick wants us to make a moral judgement - with our minds, not with our stomachs.

If you're wondering about the title: there's a cockney expression "queer as a clockwork orange"; and Anthony Burgess, author of the original book, spoke Malay and would have known that orang is Malay for man. Alex is queer as a clockwork orang. It's fitting that the precise meaning of the title is as elusive as the precise meaning of the film, which is a still-potent masterpiece; you can't afford to miss it.'