Great Movie
This movie is funny, intense, and pure greatness. Almost as good as the book. A lot less sexual than the book Lolita. Even though this movie is black and white it somehow feels colorful because of Lolita's personality.

Very disjointed...
It goes without saying that the book is better than the movie, but I just had to say it anyway because it's so true. There are a ton of great reviews of the movie here on Amazon so I'll be brief.

3 Stars were given becuase of the very fine acting, especially Shelly Winters. Winters portrays almost exactly the Charlotte Haze that I had envisioned in my mind when reading the book. Sue Lyon does a fine job as Dolores even though she looks nothing at all like how I pictured Lolita in my mind, she's too pretty.

My main gripe about the movie is the incessant fading to black after every scene and the constant appearances of Quilty!
The most annoying scene in the entire movie is when Quilty comes out to talk to Humbert at the hotel.
In the movie Peter Sellers goes on a long strange ramble that makes very little sense and was a little annoying to me.
However, this scene in the book, when the understandably paranoid Humbert is biding his time waiting for his drugged nymphet to finally go unconscious is surprised to find another guest on the patio with him, is one of my very favorite scenes in the book. The artful way that Nabokov has our "poor Humbert" mis-hear the casual conversation of his fellow guest was truly a master work of literature, the movie totally botched this scene!
OK movie of a great book...

Does the novel justice
I think Nabokov's Lolita is one of the greatest novels of all time, and Kubrick's film version does the book ample justice. James Mason is sublime as Humbert Humbert - an intellectual old world European emigre who finds himself in 1950s America on a professorship. His patrician aloofness rubs against the provincial Charlotte Hayes - a homely woman struggling with a recalcitrant daughter Lolita. The poor woman has no idea the depths of the obsession within Humbert's mind - all swirling high culture and depraved Eros. She gives him space in her house to write, and falls in love with him. Humbert is after something much darker - her brattish, nymphette daughter Lolita, but marries Mrs Hayes in order to maintain contact with the family.

The Nabokov style is encapsulated in the film: 'And when called upon to enjoy my promotion from lodger to lover, did I experience only bitterness and distaste? No. Mr. Humbert confesses to a certain titillation of his vanity, to some faint tenderness, even to a pattern of remorse, daintily running along the steel of his conspiratorial dagger.'

The movie, necessarily can't be as dark as the novel given the subject matter. Lolita is more high school prom queen than true pre-teen. Clare Quilty features as a chameleon rival, played with comic mastery by Peter Sellars. It is a different type of comedy than the novel - more laconic and at times slapstic (the cot in the bedroom scene) than truly dark chocolate subversive. But a Kubrick triumph in any case. And the notoriously hard to please Nabokov thought so too.

1961 Film Noir..
Brilliant 2 1/2 hours of character portrayal by Mason, Sellers, Winters and the lovely Lolita underscoring the emotional dark side 1960's style.
Kubrick's depiction of Freudian sexuality, murder,possesiveness,insecurity, a world without purpose but the maximization of one's pleasure within one's own private world shot and executed so carefully as to all detail makes this a remarkable tour De force.
This film adaption whether true to the original makes no difference since this movie is cast in the contemporary 1960's at a cusp of sociological change.
The drama is excellent and what comes to mind is Joan Crawford's Possessed and Edward G. Robinson's Scarlet Street but shot in the early 1960's with all themes intact.
The movies captures the tensions between the old and new extremely well,

Travesty: Portrait of the Rapist as a Gentleman
What is wrong with this movie? Almost everything. It turns Nabokov's text about the memoirs of a pedophile into a melancholy comedy about a sad middle aged man, Mason, who gets trapped by a very young seducer and fights for her with a silly Sellers character.
The movie contributed to the stereotype of the prematurely sexy girl, who entraps older men.
That is not what Nabokov's book was about. I think the book can not be turned into a movie without being either illegal or messing up the contents badly and mortally. Humbert Humbert, the main character and narrator of the book, is attracted to female children, not to the type of 'Lolita' that has become idiomatic after the film, i.e. a sexy precocious seducer. The book is a complex construction based on the untrustworthy story teller concept. We know that HH is a lier.
Nabokov wrote not only the novel, but also the original script for the film, and when the film did get Oscars, he got one for the script, though Kubrick had in fact largely ignored the script. There is a Library of America edition which includes the novel and the script. The end product is just something else, and it is something not very appealing.