Let me try to describe what makes the cinematography in Barry Lyndon remarkable without just listing technical facts you could find on Wikipedia.

Kubrick used NASA-developed lenses to shoot scenes lit only by candlelight. That's the technical fact. What the technical fact produces is images that have a quality of light that the camera had never captured before: warm, sourceless, diffuse, slightly unreal. The film looks like Gainsborough paintings come to life, which is appropriate because Barry Lyndon is a film about a man trying to live inside the surface of an 18th-century portrait.

But the formal beauty is also the trap. The film is gorgeous and cold. Barry himself is gorgeous and hollow. The symmetry between form and content — the way the film's visual perfection mirrors its protagonist's moral emptiness — is the actual achievement.

Most people who bounce off Barry Lyndon are reacting to the temperature. That is the correct reaction. The film is designed to produce it.