S1E3 - Required Viewing 03: Barry Lyndon

Is it even a movie? That's the question Barry Lyndon has provoked since 1975 — three hours of scenes so composed they look less like cinema than oil paintings that happen to breathe. This week on Required Viewing, Dr. David D. Perlmutter — "the Prof" — drags Stanley Kubrick's most beautiful, most divisive film to the table: the one even Kubrick devotees can't agree is a film at all.

We get into the candlelight Kubrick captured with lenses built for NASA, a production that had to invent its own tools to exist, and a static, painterly style that would ripple forward into The Fa...