Its story of an 18th-century social climber, adapted from Thackeray, unfolds in Gainsborough-esque landscapes and in rooms lit either by milky-white sunshine or shimmering candle flames.
Barry Lyndon (1975)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:49
Fresh:46
Rotten:3
Average Rating:7.8/10
Theatrical Release:30-01-2009
Synopsis: BARRY LYNDON is Stanley Kubrick's epic costume drama based on William Makepeace Thackeray's picaresque novel. It tells the story of a young rogue who wanders through life getting lost in various... BARRY LYNDON is Stanley Kubrick's epic costume drama based on William Makepeace Thackeray's picaresque novel. It tells the story of a young rogue who wanders through life getting lost in various adventures, meeting his share of women and oddball characters. When Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal, trying desperately to maintain an Irish brogue) becomes jealous of Captain Quin's advances on Barry's beloved cousin, he challenges the man to a duel. Winning the duel, young Barry is forced to leave his home and his mother, and off on his adventures he goes. He meets thieves, lonely soldier brides, Prussian army leaders, and British widows, inventing new stories about himself at every turn of the road. BARRY LYNDON is lush and magnificent, sparkling with color, every frame reminiscent of the finest European art. The blues of the Prussian army uniforms and the reds of the British contrast sharply with the majestic green land and mountains in nearly every background. Kubrick often begins a shot close in, then zooms out to reveal the beautiful natural landscape and ornate rooms surrounding the now seemingly insignificant characters. With rousing performances from O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Hardy Kruger, and Leonard Rossiter, jaw-dropping camerawork, spectacular natural lighting, and a marvelous classical-music soundtrack painstakingly put together by Kubrick, BARRY LYNDON is a dramatic romantic epic that may be Kubrick's most beautiful film. [More]
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger
Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Steven Berkoff, Gay Hamilton, Marie Kean, Murray Melvin, Andre Morell, Leonard Rossiter, Philip Stone
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Producer: Stanley Kubrick
Composer: Leonard Rosenman
Reviews for Barry Lyndon
The film's truly outstanding performance is by Patrick Magee, an actor of terrifying intensity.
One of cinema’s most heartfelt and sustained (it runs over three hours), if cynical, visions of an individual’s powerlessness.
It's a tour de force, with the director pushing the limits of film technology to realise his singular vision, developing new camera lenses to tell this 18th Century cautionary tale with only natural, available light.
It’s a work of technical brilliance and considerable beauty; the slow and deliberate pacing only serves to make Barry’s adventures more fascinating.
Director Stanley Kubrick's opulent epic is certainly a feast for the eyes, with every scene beautifully framed and the attention to exquisite detail breathtaking.
You can't tear your eyes from it. Loosely held together by Michael Hordern's drolly ironic narration, it might not catch very much of Thackeray's tone but it creates a world that is sumptuously, even shockingly, vivid.
Like all Kubrick films, it's a curiosity, but Barry Lyndon contains more than enough beauty, artistry and hard-won truth to justify its conceits.
Kubrick's superb version of William Thackery's first novel is meticulous and philosophically stimulating but it can leave some audiences unmoved on an emotional level.
The constant array of waxworks figures against lavish backdrops finally vulgarises the visual sumptuousness.
A bold, experimental screen adaptation, Kubrick's much understood film at the time of its release, is a masterpiece, marking the helmer's meticulous attention to every single frame.
It paints a detailed picture of Europe's 18th-century period that could have been drawn by master painters such as Constable, Gainborough and Watteau.
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.
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.
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.
Seeing Barry Lyndon a second time, I found myself charmed by just how funny and lively it is, in an underplayed way, when it just seemed cold the first time around.
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