Barry Lyndon (1975) is an adventure, drama, history film. It opens when an Irish rogue wins the heart of a rich widow and assumes her dead husband's aristocratic position in 18th-century England.
Stanley Kubrick's magisterial Thackeray adaptation now stands as one of his greatest and most savagely ironic films, not to mention one of the few period pieces on celluloid so transporting that it seems to predate the invention of cameras.
Independent (UK)
July 29, 2016
Every frame of every battle scene or courtly interlude is exhaustively and exquisitely detailed.
It's gorgeous to look at, with its reverse zooms that slowly widen to stunning rural panoramas, its beautiful framing, its delight in decorative detail. You feel you are watching a masterclass in how to recreate the look and feel of the late 18th century.
As leisurely as it is painterly, this is a masterclass in cinematography - famously, Kubrick used nothing but natural light in all but a few scenes. Don't miss the chance to watch it in a cinema.
Barry Lyndon isn't a great success, and it's not a great entertainment, but it's a great example of directorial vision: Kubrick saying he's going to make this material function as an illustration of the way he sees the world.
Ryan O'Neal's excellent performance captures the shallow opportunism endemic to the title character who is brought down as much by his own flaws as by the mores of the ordered social structure of 18th-century England.
All of Stanley Kubrick's features look better now than when they were first released, but Barry Lyndon, which fared poorly at the box office in 1975, remains his most underrated. It may also be his greatest.
This is a period film like no other, a slow but utterly hypnotic tale of an Irish youth whose adventures and misfortunes take in the Seven Years' War, the gambling clubs of Europe and marriage into the English aristocracy.
