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 practically rebuilt a filmmaking industry to exist in 1975, and a static, painterly style that would ripple forward into The Favourite. We wrestle with Ryan O'Neal's passive, buffeted Barry, the narrator who condemns him before he can charm us, and a film so often called "beautiful but empty" — asking whether the emptiness is the whole point. Class as a cage, a scoundrel with no moral agency, and a technical achievement so singular it's a genre of one that simply couldn't be made today.

Media scholar Dr. David D. Perlmutter and Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, take it apart from every angle.

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The Kulturecast is a film and culture podcast from Weirding Way Media, hosted by Chris Stachiw, the Doctor of Podcasting, alongside a rotating table of guest co-hosts. Each week digs into where film and culture meet — and how each one bends the other. Now home to sub-feeds including Required Viewing: A 360° Film Study with Dr. David D. Perlmutter.

New episodes weekly.

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