The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“One of the most beautiful of all Stanley Kubrick’s films … As leisurely as it is painterly, this is a masterclass in cinematography … Don’t miss the chance to watch it in a cinema.”

Wendy Ide, The Observer

Stanley Kubrick’s lavish adaptation of Thackeray’s picaresque novel was once dismissed by Pauline Kael and others as a ​“coffee-table movie,” but has since made its long, inexorable climb to masterpiece status—and to recognition as one of Kubrick’s pinnacle achievements. Ryan O’Neal is the eponymous Barry Lyndon, an 18th-century Irish rogue and social climber in relentless, unscrupulous pursuit of wealth and status. Kubrick’s painterly film was a massively expensive undertaking. Painstakingly researched to ensure historical accuracy, sumptuously costumed, and filmed on location in Ireland, Great Britain, and Germany, it took some 300 days to shoot and made pioneering use of an ultra-sensitive, NASA-developed lens in order to film sequences lit only by candlelight. Barry Lyndon won Oscars for its cinematography, art direction, costumes, and musical score. This stunning 50th anniversary restoration closed out Cannes Classics in May.

“Highly accomplished as a piece of storytelling, and it builds to one of the most suspenseful duels ever staged. It also repays close attention as a complex and fascinating historical meditation, as enigmatic in its way as 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“One of [Kubrick’s] 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 … The film’s greatness can make a viewer feel like a speck in the cosmos.”

Jim Ridley, Village Voice