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

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 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

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

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 Kubrick's view of things that ultimately counts, not the illustrative talents of others he brings to bear on it. And that seems to me virtually indecipherable. He is like a batsman trying to score a century without anybody noticing.

| Feb 25, 2025

It's time audiences saw through Kubrick's sleight-of-hand... Barry Lyndon looks like a peacock but it's a turkey.

| Feb 25, 2025

The brilliance of Kubrick's early work makes the jeweled corpse of Barry Lyndon more depressing. What has gone wrong? That question requires a complex answer. One problem is the increasing shallowness of Kubrick's cynicism.

| Feb 25, 2025

The real star, of course, is writer-director Kubrick, and his film is a very personal achievement in technique and editing. Though certainly more than an epic costume picture, Barry Lyndon is a triumph of style.

| Feb 25, 2025

[Stanley Kubrick] has painted a beautiful, ultra-romantic canvas that is highly entertaining to the eye and will be remembered for that, even if it leaves little fodder for continuing thought processes.

| Feb 25, 2025

Kubrick has re-drawn the characters and re-written the narrative in a way completely to reverse Thackeray's intentions. The result is not a brutal, boisterous story, but one that's slow and sentimental.

| Feb 25, 2025

Filmed in a poetic, loving majesty that makes each frame of the film stand out like a priceless painting, it is quite clearly the masterwork of master movie-maker Stanley Kubrick and the picture that he'll have to shoot at from now on.

| Feb 25, 2025