Barry Lyndon

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon opened in 1975, between A Clockwork Orange and The Shining, and won four Academy Awards — Cinematography (John Alcott), Production Design, Costume Design, and Original Score (Leonard Rosenman's adaptations of Schubert and Handel). The film was a commercial disappointment on release; its reputation has steadily climbed across the intervening decades, and it now sits in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll.

Across three hours and four chapters, an Irish rogue named Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) works his way through eighteenth-century Europe — service in the Seven Years' War for both the British and the Prussians, a career as a Continental gambler with the Chevalier de Balibari, marriage into English aristocracy as the new Lord Lyndon — and then loses everything he has accumulated. Marisa Berenson plays Lady Lyndon; Patrick Magee is the Chevalier; Hardy Krüger is the Prussian Captain Potzdorf.

Kubrick shot the film entirely by available natural and candle light, using custom-modified Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses originally developed by NASA for moon-photography. The interior candlelit sequences are widely considered among the most beautiful images ever committed to film. John Alcott's cinematography reframed every interior scene around eighteenth-century painting (Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds), with the ducking-headers staging the conversation as if from a Wright of Derby. The film's tempo, its irony, and its closing observation that all of these people are now equal in death have made it permanently distinctive in Kubrick's filmography.