There will be a 10 minute intermission in the middle of this film at the 1 hour, 42 minute mark.

With its meticulous historical accuracy and its astonishing visual beauty, Kubrick’s most underrated work is also probably his greatest. Expertly combining caricature with actorly restraint while creating immaculate painterly tableaux with natural light or candles, Kubrick creates a world that feels ineffably strange yet utterly real. As he quietly castigates not the conniving protagonist but the hypocritical, complacent society he determines to join, the mood steadily shifts from irony to melancholy and, finally, tragedy.

Deriving its story and characters (but not its tonal delicacy) from Thackeray’s comic novel about an 18th-century rake, the film deploys a stately pace to chart the rise and fall of Redmond Barry (O’Neal) as he flees Ireland, travels Europe and eventually seduces his way into the English aristocracy to become the noble Barry Lyndon.

Reviews
"Kubrick examines Barry’s life with microscopic clarity. He has the confidence of the great 19th century novelists, authors who stood above their material and accepted without question their right to manipulate and interpret it with omniscience." –Roger Ebert