ALWAYS EXPECTING THE VERY BEST FROM STANLEY KUBRICK

Most industry screenings of upcoming movies in Hollywood end the same way. Members of the audience exchange some parting comments (“What else are you seeing this week?”), then try to slip away without making eye contact with any of the anxious representatives from the films or their studios.

Doctors see that same look in the eyes of patients waiting for lab reports.

“Is it . . . is it . . . ?”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’m afraid it’s mindless trash.”

Once in a while, there seems to be some genuine enthusiasm, as there was last week for Orion’s industry preview of “RoboCop,” and on rare occasions, audiences will mill around afterward--without the inducement of open bars and free gnosh--and actually discuss what they’ve just seen.

The latter occurred just three weeks ago after Warner Bros.’ first preview of Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket.” It took Kubrick more than two years to make the movie, but the results on how well he had made it were in by the time the audience at the motion picture academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater reached the lobby.

It’s a masterpiece! No, wait, it’s a major disappointment! Well, actually, parts of it are brilliant and parts of it are disappointing. It’s the greatest movie yet about the Vietnam War. It’s not about Vietnam, it’s about the corruption of the spirit, the loss of humanity through militarism. It is an original piece of work, marred by cliches.

If some viewers thought it was mindless trash, they wisely kept it to themselves.

This was not just an advance screening, it was an advance screening of a Stanley Kubrick film. As events among movie lovers go, Kubrick premieres rank with eclipses of the sun. Measured by anticipation, “Full Metal Jacket” may be the most important English-language film of the decade.

Pity the critics who didn’t like “Full Metal Jacket.” Calling a Kubrick movie a failure is like calling Mother Teresa selfish. And these days, when so few movies qualify as events on any level, it would seem a worthy misdemeanor for disappointed critics to rave on about “Full Metal Jacket” as a public service--to help inform young audiences as to what film making can be, and to encourage studios to throw more money at Kubrick in hopes that he will connect more solidly his next time out.

Hollywood’s mainstream audience must be wondering what all the fuss over Kubrick is about. The 18- to 24-year-olds for whom the studios lust were 11- to 17-year-olds when Kubrick’s last film, “The Shining,” was released in 1980. Most of them were not even born when his last great movie--”A Clockwork Orange”--was released in 1971.

In fact, in the 30 years since “Paths of Glory” singled him out as one of the special directors of modern film, Kubrick has made exactly eight pictures. Even the worst of them--”Spartacus” and “Barry Lyndon”--were pretty good, and at least two--”Dr. Strangelove” and “2001”--are ranked by most critics among the best films ever made.

It is the potential for greatness that marks Kubrick premieres as major film-going events. For optimistic film buffs--as endangered a species as the California condor--there is the hope that the best film ever made is yet to be made. If so, they reason, Kubrick is among a handful of active directors capable of making it.

Tastes and opinions vary, but most lists of directors whose bodies of work would encourage us to hope for the best would include Kubrick, Martin Scorsese (despite the slick digression of “The Color of Money”), Bernardo Bertolucci and Federico Fellini.

John Huston, David Lean, Akira Kurosawa and Ingmar Bergman are near the ends of their careers and Francis Coppola is in a slump from which only a second sequel to “The Godfather” (reportedly nearing “go” status at Paramount) may be able to rescue him.

There are other American directors whose films have become events for large segments of the mainstream film-going population. Sydney Pollack’s pictures are usually guaranteed entertainment for sophisticated adult tastes, and Steven Spielberg, despite “The Color Purple,” still seems capable of making the best adventure movie ever made. In fact, a lot of people think he will have to out-do himself and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” to achieve that.

Of all of the resident Americans (the Bronx-born Kubrick expatriated to London more than 25 years ago), Woody Allen remains the great red, white and blue hope. Allen is the best auteur (writer and director) in this country and the only one with a studio green light to make whatever he wants to make.

Allen’s movie-a-year pace and his egocentric Manhattan parochialism may make the ultimate film a longshot, but for a lot of people, “Annie Hall” didn’t miss by far and he hasn’t disappointed anyone since “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” five years ago.

Word is that Allen, whose “Hannah and Her Sisters” was a major contender for the best picture Oscar despite its spring opening, agreed to allow Orion Pictures to release his next (still untitled) movie at Christmas this year. That will certainly make it fresh in the minds of academy voters, but it will also put him in competition with himself.

“Radio Days,” the other event movie this year, was not bad.