Barry Lyndon (Blu-Ray, #897)

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 ONeal) 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 masterpiecea sardonic, devastating portrait of a vanishing world whose opulence conceals the moral vacancy at its heart.

SPECIAL FEATURES

New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray

Alternate 5.1 surround soundtrack, presented in DTS-HD Master Audio on the Blu-ray

New documentary featuring cast and crew interviews as well as audio excerpts from a 1976 interview with director Stanley Kubrick

New program about the films 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 Awardwinning production designer Ken Adam

New interview with editor Tony Lawson

French television interview from 1976 with Ulla-Britt Sderlund, who codesigned the films 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 OBrien and two pieces about the look of the film from the March 1976 issue of American Cinematographer