The Bed Sitting Room (Richard Lester, 1969)

Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in The Bed Sitting Room

Cast: Rita Tushingham, Michael Hordern, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Ralph Richardson, Arthur Lowe, Mona Washbourne, Richard Warwick, Marty Feldman, Harry Secombe, Roy Kinnear, Spike Milligan, Ronald Fraser, Jimmy Edwards, Frank Thornton, Dandy Nichols. Screenplay: John Antrobus, Charles Wood, based on a play by Spike Milligan and John Antrobus. Cinematography: David Watkin. Production design: Assheton Gorton. Film editing: John Victor Smith. Music: Ken Thorne.

Seemingly every comic actor in 1960s Britain turns up somewhere in Richard Lester's The Bed Sitting Room, but they don't generate many laughs. The problem with most absurdist comedies is the absence of a grounding normality, and in the post-apocalyptic setting of the film, in which Britain has been turned into a vast trash dump by a nuclear war, there's not much to serve as a norm against which its silliness can play out. The point is to satirize our pre-apocalyptic complacency, and once you get that point the film mostly asks you to sit around and wait for your particular favorite actor to make his or her appearance. Oh, there's Ralph Richardson. Ah, that's Mona Washbourne. Good, that's Marty Feldman. And so on for 90 minutes. It only seems longer.

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975)

From the rather uninvolved performance he gives here, it's a little hard to realize that Ryan O'Neal was once a major movie star. Scenes are stolen from him right and left by such skilled character actors as Patrick Magee, Hardy Krüger, Steven Berkoff, Murray Melvin, Leonard Rossiter, and Leon Vitale. But this detachment of the titular character seems to be part of Kubrick's plan to de-emphasize the story's drama: He even provides a narrator (Michael Hordern) who gives away the plot before it develops on the screen. When actions and emotions erupt in the story, they do so with a kind of jolt, the audience having been lulled by the stately pace of the film and by the undeniably gorgeous visuals: Ken Adam's production design, Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero's costumes, and John Alcott's cinematography all won Oscars, as did Leonard Rosenman's orchestration of themes from Schubert, Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Handel. It is undeniably one of the most visually beautiful films ever made, its images intentionally echoing works by Hogarth, Reynolds, Romney, Gainsborough, and other 18th-century artists. Alcott used specially designed lenses, created for NASA to allow low-light filming, to allow many scenes to be filmed by candlelight. But it's also a painfully slow movie, stretching to more than three hours. I don't have anything against slowness: One of my favorite movies, Tokyo Story (Yasujiro Ozu, 1953), is often criticized for slowness. But the slowness of Ozu's film is in service of characters we come to know and care about. Kubrick gives us no one to care about very much, and O'Neal's Barry never registers as a developed character.