With its electrifying score of synthesized Beethoven and Purcell, its outlandish costuming and its wide-angle grotesqueries, A Clockwork Orange is one of Kubrick’s more confrontationally stylized films. Liberally adapted from a dystopian satire written in a made-up vernacular by Anthony Burgess as a funhouse reflection of postwar panic over youth crime in the UK, the film charts the misadventures of a teenage delinquent, Alex (Malcolm McDowell), and his three “droogs” who scour London committing heinous acts of “ultraviolence.” When one evening of mischief goes awry, and Alex winds up captive to a state eager to test out a burgeoning form of experimental behavioral therapy, the film becomes both a provocative comedy of manners and a philosophical treatise on justice and free will. Just as the sweet sounds of “lovely Ludwig Van” become coercively skewered for Alex, Kubrick upends audience expectations in a series of ironic reversals.