A magnificent Ferrari compared to the assembly line of Volkswagens and Cadillacs of moviedom. To criticize Kubrick for making a gorgeous movie about a loveless world of decadent grandeur is like bawling out Dostoevsky for writing about [degenerates].

| Feb 25, 2025

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.

| Feb 25, 2025

A pretentious, tiresome, fatuous bore, a piece of inflated and contrived elegance that is as desolate as the backside of the moon. Protected by his praetorian guard of critics, Stanley Kubrick gives the auteur theory a bad name.

| Feb 25, 2025

Barry Lyndon is another success for Stanley Kubrick. How unfortunate that so few people will ever know it.

| Feb 25, 2025

Kubrick is one of the few directors working in films today who can legitimately be called a genius without blushing. He has made a motion picture extravaganza that combines art, literature and love, raising the movies to a cultural zenith.

| Feb 25, 2025

Barry Lyndon is as stultifying as it is prodigious. For a start, the picture appears to have been designed by someone who learned the art at Madame Tussaud's.

| Feb 25, 2025

Barry Lyndon emerges as perhaps Kubrick's most intensely human spectacle, comparable to Paths of Glory in its tragic confrontations that seem to throw whole worlds into the balance with individual lives.

| Feb 25, 2025

Barry Lyndon gives us a rare glimpse into the chasm between what a director thinks he's accomplished and what he's actually accomplished.

| Feb 25, 2025

Barry Lyndon is pure cinema, and, if you only let it, its aching beauty will wipe you out.

| Feb 25, 2025

Seeking the sources of our alienation in the explosively random energies of the eighteenth century, Kubrick has created an epic of esthetic self-indulgence, beautiful but empty. He needs to come back to earth from the outer spaces of past and future.

| Feb 25, 2025

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.

| Feb 25, 2025

A consummate work of art, a "literary" period piece brought to cinema terms of remarkable intelligence and overwhelming beauty.

| Feb 25, 2025

To make Barry Lyndon work, the spectator has first to shed expectations about the genre... and then to achieve a series of adjustments between a setting which represents an age’s finest view of itself, and the fatalistic melancholy of the human prospect.

| Feb 25, 2025

It is the shortest three hours you're ever apt to spend in a motion picture theater. It is light and lively when it should be, poignantly dramatic at the proper times and even pompous when it is time to be pompous.

| Feb 25, 2025

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.

| Feb 25, 2025

This story has been told and retold, perhaps as often as stories have been told by men. But seldom has the story been told in such a cloak of visual beauty and with such subtle and canny artistic force.

| Feb 25, 2025

A highly impressive slide show, a spendthrift's photographic tour through the green fields and burnished castles of 18th-Century Ireland, England and Germany. It's simply too bad it's not a movie.

| Feb 25, 2025

I found [it] to be quite obvious about its intentions and thoroughly successful in achieving them. Kubrick has taken a novel about social class and has turned it into an utterly comfortable story that conveys the stunning emptiness of upper-class life.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Feb 25, 2025

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.

| Feb 25, 2025

It is all so very absorbing and rewarding that one can even forgive Kubrick the four years it took him to complete the film. Barry Lyndon should easily keep us happy for another four years. Easily.

| Feb 25, 2025