"Stanley Kubrick bent the conventions of the historical drama to his own will in this dazzling version 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...

A gentlemanly rogue travels the battlefields and parlors of 18th century Europe, determined to make for himself the life of a nobleman through seduction, gambling, and dueling in this methodical film showing the rhythm and life of the period.