Roger Ebert says Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon is one of the most beautiful films ever made. It is gorgeous, and amazing--exterior shots often use shadows to emphasis layers of depth, most incredibly by using the shadows of clouds. One wonders if the 300 day shooting schedule was so Kubrick could wait for clouds to hit their marks.
Meanwhile, many night interiors were shot entirely without electric light, relying purely on candlelight, something which obliged Kubrick to find super-fast 50mm lenses.
The white, gold, and powder blue of the Baroque and Rococo interiors turn to shades of gold--in Barry Lyndon, we see half of the beauty of these antiquated styles almost never seen in period films.
These shots are presented with no fanfare, and the casually brilliant quality of the visuals perfectly compliments the story of Barry Lyndon. Not, to me, a particularly morally corrupt man as Roger Ebert and some other reviewers have claimed of him, but rather an extraordinarily unremarkable man for a tale of such epic proportions. It makes his misfortunes all the more meaningful because it forces us to contemplate the average man's, rather than the extraordinary man's, right to happiness and freedom from injustice.
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