Film Forum

BARRY LYNDON

5:10  Buy Tickets

(1975, Stanley Kubrick) Kubrick’s epic adaptation of Thackeray’s ironic, picaresque 1844 novel was a major change of pace, recreating the past (as he’d previously created a future) via lavish costumes, location shooting in stately 18^th century houses across England and Ireland, and the music of Handel, Mozart, the Chieftains, et al. After his father’s death, itinerant Irish wastrel and rogue Ryan O’Neal moves from a find-the-handkerchief-in-the-bodice game with his provincial cousin to service with Frederick the Great’s spy network, eventually conquering the gaming tables of Europe with fake chevalier Patrick Magee and marrying stunningly beautiful aristo Marisa Berenson – but fate intervenes in a climactic duel at dawn. Kubrick, ever the technical innovator, used specially-constructed Zeiss lenses to film massive game-, drawing-, and ballrooms lit exclusively by candlelight (as featured in the cinematography doc Visions of Light), resulting in its selection by American Cinematographer magazine as one of the best-shot films of the modern era and an Academy Award for lensman John Alcott, one of four wins out of 11 nominations. DCP. Approx. 185 min.

“An ice-pack of a movie, a masterpiece in ever insignificant detail… It’s a coffee-table movie; the stately tour of European high life is a three-hour slide show for art history majors.”
– Pauline Kael

THE CASE OF THE MUKKINESE BATTLE-HORN

4:20   8:30  Buy Tickets

(1956, Joseph Sterling) Nonstop mania from alumni of legendary Brit radio comedy The Goon Show: wordplay, puns, misplaced literalism, asides to the camera as a young Peter Sellers’ intrepid sleuth is on the track of the eponymous horn (apparently a jewel-encrusted saxophone). 35mm print courtesy BFI. Approx. 30 min.