This film was proposed by our member Edward Leane, who writes: 'In my opinion, Kubrick’s finest masterpiece. Stunningly shot rags to riches to rags story that feels like you are being transported back in time.'

*A 5min intermission is included in the screening.

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of a pitiless aristocracy, adapted from a novel by William Makepeace Thackeray. In picaresque detail, Barry Lyndon chronicles the adventures of an incorrigible trickster (Ryan O’Neal) whose opportunism takes him from an Irish farm to the battlefields of the Seven Years’ War and the parlors of high society. For the most sumptuously crafted film of his career, Kubrick recreated the decadent surfaces and intricate social codes of the period, evoking the light and texture of eighteenth-century painting with the help of pioneering cinematographic techniques and lavish costume and production design, all of which earned Academy Awards. The result is a masterpiece—a sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.

Please note, the screening on Wednesday 27 September is our Free Members' Screening. The screening the following week, on Wednesday 4 October is a regular screening.

To propose your own screening, log into your members’ account to visit the Members’ Area.

Cast:
Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger