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I'll say that Kubrick is one of cinema's greatest stylists. His films are immediately recognisable (I'd say that only Fellini eclipses him in this respect). My problem with him is that his attitude to making films limited the type he was successful with. Kubrick was great with sets, but awful with people, which he treated as mere props, or cyphers. He had no feel for the personal, which is why Jack Nicholson in The Shining is never able to move beyond the mere 'crazy', and why Shelley Duval in the same film seems to switch solely between a state of blubbing and hysteria. His characters aren't people, they're types (arguably the greatest Kubrickesque performance in this respect is provided by Hal, a computer.) It's the reason why a film like Eyes Wide Shut (a film that demanded a director interested in human psychology) is such a failure. All filmmakers are, to some degree, limited by their style, but with Kubrick it was always just too much for me. In this respect he always reminds me of Herzog or Michael Mann.
I always think Coppola and Spielberg are two filmmakers that have managed to more successfully achieve that balance between the grand spectacle and the personal. And of course the sheer jaw-dropping scariness of Fellini and Ford was that they managed to nail it every bloody time. I shudder to think what Kubrick would've done with something like The Searchers, The Godfather, Close Encounters or 8 1/2.
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