Flying Padre is a slick, professional piece of work about the Reverend Fred Stadtmueller who, the voiceover tells us, travels by plane because his 11 churches are situated in 4,000 square miles of territory. […] However, Kubrick manages to sneak a few of his own touches into the eight minutes. There are many views of the airplane, and from the airplane, that are later echoed in the almost fetishistic depiction of spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The close-ups of faces at the funeral are reminiscent of the style of Sergei Eisenstein, whose work Kubrick studied intensely at this time.

Paul Duncan, Stanley Kubrick: The Complete Films, Taschen, Cologne 2003