[Lyndon] is very Gen Z, essentially sympathetic but aware that he’s perpetually at the mercy of aristocrats, scoundrels, brigands and army captains alike.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 22, 2025

Not simply a hoisted petard about people in power but a hosted perspective for all humankind: All that is promised in life to anyone is its end, and Stanley Kubrick lays bare the notion that hanging on in quiet desperation is not just the English way

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 12, 2025

Barry Lyndon is a film altogether about time, one of the good reasons for experiencing the full 185 minutes continuously, in a cinema. It’s much more rewarding to see on a big screen.

Full Review | Jul 9, 2025

Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is a wildly-entertaining adventure that utilizes gorgeous production design, costumes, makeup, and cinematography to tell the compelling tale of its titular antihero.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 8, 2025

It isn’t vulgar to suggest that Kubrick may have identified with Barry the autodidact.

Full Review | Jul 7, 2025

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].

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2025

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2025

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2025

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

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | 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.

Full Review | Feb 25, 2025