The reverse zoom shot, a technique employed to striking effect across Kubrick’s filmography, is elevated to an ethos in Barry Lyndon, the director’s lone foray into the costume drama. Recounting the decades-spanning rise and fall of the eponymous rogue (Ryan O’Neal) in 18th century Europe, the film places its audience in the position of bemused voyeurs rather than narrative participants, with the painterly photography and proscenium framing emphasizing our temporal and cultural remove from the action. The magic of the film, however, is that the players in this immaculate tableau vivant—various long-dead members of the European aristocracy—become deeply sympathetic nonetheless, even with Michael Horndern’s deadpan third-person narration cutting them down to size at every turn. Famously filmed with lenses procured from NASA to capture the delicate quality of light in candlelit interiors, this sublime picaresque brings the same sense of awe to history as Kubrick brought to the cosmos seven years prior.