I think Barry Lyndon is the most intelligent, most amazing, most radical movie Stanley Kubrick has made—which is to say it's among the great achievements of contemporary cinema. I think the "failure" of this film is a failure of the collective imagination and I'm ashamed at the incomprehension and hostility with which our illustrious critics and noble citizens have dismissed it. Ashamed but not surprised. For at the heart of Barry Lyndon there's a silence that challenges the strength of the imagination, and imaginative courage is these days in exile….

I can think of few films of such intrinsic existential power, sans ideology and melodrama. This is pure cinema at full force, miraculous to behold. It may be the most "beautiful" movie ever made, but the beauty is in its logic as much as its images—which are so colored and distinguished as to defy description. This...