A Clockwork Orange

A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 film written, produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, adapted from Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel, following Alex DeLarge, played by Malcolm McDowell, a teenage gang leader in a near-future Britain whose acts of extreme violence lead to his imprisonment, where he undergoes an experimental behavioral conditioning treatment, the Ludovico technique, intended to cure him of violent impulses. The film's stylized ultraviolence and its questioning of whether state-imposed conditioning that removes moral choice can be called a cure provoked intense controversy on release; Kubrick himself withdrew it from British distribution after reports linking it to copycat violence, a withdrawal that stood until after his death. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture and is regarded as one of Kubrick's most influential and disputed works.