WATCH PARTY: Barry Lyndon (1975) dir. Stanley Kubrick @ Richard Tucker Library
Details
This Kubrick movie is always mentioned for its use of natural lighting. We'll be in the meeting room with the nice big screen to the left of the entrance at Richard Tucker to check it out.
RUNTIME: 185 minutes
RATED: PG
SYNOPSIS (via Criterion): Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.
BLURBS:
"What he did for the future in 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick in Barry Lyndon has done for the past. He has projected us into an age of amazing strangeness." - Alexander Walker, London Evening Standard
"Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is clearly the most expensive meditation on melancholy ever financed by a Hollywood studio. From the opening strains of Georg Friedrich Handel's Sarabande... every frame in the film is a fresco of sadness." - Andrew Sarris, Village Voice
"Barry Lyndon is one of the most beautiful films I have ever seen. It is also too long and lovingly excessive, and Kubrick could have been more temperate. But such moderation is not an element of his film-making and doubtless never will be." - Desmond Ryan, Philadelphia Inquirer