The Alien Majesty of Kubrick's <em>Barry Lyndon</em>
A new Criterion Collection release of the 1975 period piece highlights just how unique the director’s vision of the past was.
Every time I watch , my eye is immediately drawn to the candles. They’re in dozens of scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 classic historical drama, sometimes as the only form of light—a miraculous achievement of cinematography that required special camera lenses borrowed from NASA. With any Kubrick work, there’s a magisterial sense of control and overreach present in every frame, an approach that helped make him the (sometimes clichéd) embodiment of the auteur filmmaker. In , that attention to extravagant detail lies in those candles,
