Barry Lyndon (Criterion Collection) (Blu-ray)

Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling vision of brutal 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 it's heart.

Starring: Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Hardy Kruger, Gay Hamilton, Frank Middlemas, Ferdy Mayne, Anthony Dawes, David Morley, Dominic Savage, Ferdinand "Ferdy" Mayne, John Sullivan, Patrick Dawson, Roy Spencer, Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Quigley, Arthur O'Sullivan, Diana Koerner, Steven Berkoff, Marie Kean, Frank Middlemass, Murray Melvin, Andre Morell, Philip Stone, Leon Vitali, John Bindon, Roger Booth, Andre Morrell, Billy Boyle, Jonathan Cecil, Liam Redmond, Peter Cellier, Geoffrey Chater, Bernard Hepton, Barry Jackson, Wolf Kahler, Patrick Laffan, Hans Meyer, Anthony Herrick, Pat Roach, Frederick Schiller, George Sewell, Anthony Sharp, John Sharp, John Sullivan VI, Harry Towb, Michael Hordern

Director: Stanley Kubrick