Among the positive reviews, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that the film was “conspicuously different” from the novel and had “some strange confusions of style and mood,” but nevertheless had “a rare power, a garbled but often moving push toward an off-beat communication.”
Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post called it “a peculiarly brilliant film,” with a tone “not of hatred, but of mocking true. Director and author have a viewpoint on modern life that is not flattering but it is not despising, either. It is regret for the human comedy.”
Philip K. Scheuer of the Los Angeles Times said the film “manages to hit peaks of comedy shrilly dissonant but on an adult level, that are rare indeed, and at the same time to underline the tragedy in human communication, human communion, between people who’ve got their signals hopelessly crossed.”
The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that the film’s primary were “obsession and incongruity,” and since Kubrick was “an intellectual director with little feeling for erotic tension … one is the more readily disposed to accept Kubrick’s alternative approach as legitimate.”
In a generally positive review for The New Yorker, Brendan Gill wrote that “Kubrick is wonderfully self-confident; his camera having conveyed to us within the first five minutes that it can perform any wonders its master may require of it, he proceeds to offer us a succession of scenes broadly sketched and broadly acted for laughs, and laugh we do, no matter how morbid the circumstances.”
Arlene Croce in Sight & Sound wrote that “Lolita is—in its way—a good film.” She found the screenplay “a model of adaptation” and the cast “near-perfect,” though she described Kubrick’s attempts at eroticism as “perfunctory and misguided” and thought his “gift for visual comedy is as faint as his depiction of sensuality.”
Variety had a mixed assessment, calling the film “occasionally amusing but shapeless”, and likening it to “a bee from which the stinger has been removed. It still buzzes with a sort of promising irreverence, but it lacks the power to shock and eventually makes very little point either as comedy or satire.”
Harrison’s Reports was negative, writing, “You don’t have to be an emulating, prissyish uncle from Dubuque to say that the film leaves you with a feeling that is repulsively disgusting in much of its telling,” adding that “even if the exhibitor makes a dollar on the booking, he may feel a sense of shame as he plods his weary way down to the bank.”
The critical consensus reads: “Kubrick’s Lolita adapts its seemingly unadaptable source material with a sly comedic touch and a sterling performance by James Mason that transforms the controversial novel into something refreshingly new without sacrificing its essential edge.”
