Barry Lyndon (Criterion) Blu-ray (Rental)

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. TWO-BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented DTS-HD Master Audio New documentary featuring cast and crew interviews as well as audio excerpts from a 1976 interview with director Stanley Kubrick New program about the film’s groundbreaking visuals, featuring focus puller Douglas Milsome and gaffer Lou Bogue as well as excerpts from a 1980 interview with cinematographer John Alcott New program featuring historian Christopher Frayling on Academy Award–winning production designer Ken Adam New interview with editor Tony Lawson French television interview from 1976 with Ulla-Britt Söderlund, who codesigned the film’s Oscar-winning costumes New interview with critic Michel Ciment New interview with actor Leon Vitali about the 5.1 surround soundtrack, which he cosupervised New piece analyzing the fine-art-inspired aesthetics of the film with curator Adam Eaker Trailers English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing PLUS: An essay by critic Geoffrey O’Brien and two pieces about the look of the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer