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). It was a commercial disappointment on release, but its reputation has climbed steadily over the decades since, and it now sits in the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll.

Over three hours and four chapters, an Irish rogue named Redmond Barry (Ryan O'Neal) makes 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 alongside the Chevalier de Balibari, marriage into the English aristocracy as the new Lord Lyndon. Marisa Berenson plays Lady Lyndon, Patrick Magee the Chevalier and Hardy Krüger the Prussian Captain Potzdorf. The film watches its hero's progress from a great and ironic distance.

Kubrick shot the film entirely by available natural light and candlelight, using custom-modified Zeiss Planar 50mm f/0.7 lenses originally developed by NASA for photographing the moon. The candlelit interiors are, to our eyes, among the most beautiful images ever put on film. John Alcott composed every interior scene around eighteenth-century painting (Hogarth, Gainsborough, Reynolds), with some conversations staged as if in a Wright of Derby. Its slow tempo and its cool, unwavering irony give it a place apart in Kubrick's filmography, and it has never looked like anyone else's film.