Barry Lyndon is utterly the opposite of the loose, improvised movies which are so popular with many critics these days. Every detail of it is calculated; the film is as formal as a minuet.
In this essay, Michael Klein elucidates the unique nature of Kubrick’s modernist perspective, as evinced in Barry Lyndon
Since the completion of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick has repeatedly suggested that his films are inapplicable to verbal formulations. “I tried to create a visual experience,” he said of 2001 in 1968, “one that bypasses verbalizing pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophical content…