Barry Lyndon
Academy Award × 4·BFI #47·National Film Registry
Rent/Purchase
An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.
What critics thought
Barry Lyndon is one of cinema's great slow-burn reappraisals: widely received in 1975 with what one retrospective called 'dutiful admiration – but not love,' it has since climbed to near-universal esteem among critics and filmmakers. The central fault line, then and now, runs between those who find its glacial beauty transporting and those who find it inert — a film of ravishing surfaces and no pulse.
“I found Barry Lyndon to be quite obvious about its intentions and thoroughly successful in achieving them. Kubrick has taken a novel about a social class and has turned it into an utterly comfortable story that conveys the stunning emptiness of upper-class life only 200 years past.”
Gene Siskel·Chicago Tribune
“the motion picture equivalent of one of those very large, very heavy, very expensive, very elegant and very dull books that exist solely to be seen on coffee tables. It is ravishingly beautiful and incredibly tedious in about equal doses, a succession of salon quality still photographs—as often as not very still indeed.”
Charles Champlin·Los Angeles Times
“Kubrick has taken a quick-witted story”
The New Yorker
“Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, received indifferently in 1975, has grown in stature in the years since and is now widely regarded as one of the master's best. It is certainly in every frame a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness.”
Roger Ebert·RogerEbert.com
“It's not inaccurate to describe 'Barry Lyndon' as a masterpiece, but it's a deadend masterpiece, an objet d'art rather than a movie. It would be more at home, and perhaps easier to like, on the bookshelf, next to something like 'The Age of the Grand Tour,' than on the silver screen.”
The Washington Post
Genres
Adventure, Drama, War
Cast & Crew
DirectorStanley Kubrick
StarringRyan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff
ComposerLeonard Rosenman
Barry Lyndon
Academy Award × 4·BFI #47·National Film Registry
An Irish rogue uses his cunning and wit to work his way up the social classes of 18th century England, transforming himself from the humble Redmond Barry into the noble Barry Lyndon.
What critics thought
Barry Lyndon is one of cinema's great slow-burn reappraisals: widely received in 1975 with what one retrospective called 'dutiful admiration – but not love,' it has since climbed to near-universal esteem among critics and filmmakers. The central fault line, then and now, runs between those who find its glacial beauty transporting and those who find it inert — a film of ravishing surfaces and no pulse.
“I found Barry Lyndon to be quite obvious about its intentions and thoroughly successful in achieving them. Kubrick has taken a novel about a social class and has turned it into an utterly comfortable story that conveys the stunning emptiness of upper-class life only 200 years past.”
Gene Siskel·Chicago Tribune
“the motion picture equivalent of one of those very large, very heavy, very expensive, very elegant and very dull books that exist solely to be seen on coffee tables. It is ravishingly beautiful and incredibly tedious in about equal doses, a succession of salon quality still photographs—as often as not very still indeed.”
Charles Champlin·Los Angeles Times
“Kubrick has taken a quick-witted story”
The New Yorker
“Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, received indifferently in 1975, has grown in stature in the years since and is now widely regarded as one of the master's best. It is certainly in every frame a Kubrick film: technically awesome, emotionally distant, remorseless in its doubt of human goodness.”
Roger Ebert·RogerEbert.com
“It's not inaccurate to describe 'Barry Lyndon' as a masterpiece, but it's a deadend masterpiece, an objet d'art rather than a movie. It would be more at home, and perhaps easier to like, on the bookshelf, next to something like 'The Age of the Grand Tour,' than on the silver screen.”
The Washington Post
Genres
Adventure, Drama, War
Cast & Crew
DirectorStanley Kubrick
StarringRyan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff
ComposerLeonard Rosenman
Rent/Purchase