"Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling version 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 cinematic 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"--Container.
Title availability
About
Media summary
Language
English dialogue with optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired (SDH).
From the community