Barry Lyndon is 41 years old and its sparkling new digital facelift gives us the chance to reassess Stanley Kubrick’s lone flop and, to my mind, greatest masterpiece. “Glacial” they called it in 1975; “a coffee-table movie” (Pauline Kael), with a terrible bit of casting at its heart, and a misanthropist at the helm. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Firstly, let’s all lay off Ryan O’Neal. He was never in a greater movie, and I find Barry Lyndon unimaginable without him. His Americanness adds a further echo of alienation to Barry the Irish outsider. O’Neal’s face is slightly doughy and unformed throughout, suggesting that experience leaves no imprint upon Barry whatsoever – he never learns, after all. And as to the other accusation often directed at the movie – that it is cold and distant, emotionally frigid – well, the visually rhyming deaths of Captain Grogan (“Kiss me, me boy, for we’ll never meet again”) and Barry’s son Brian, in both of which the stricken figure lies with head to right of frame as Barry hovers in tears above them, are as moving to me as anything in cinema, and that’s largely due to O’Neal’s performance. Ryan O’Neal is Barry Lyndon. No do-overs. Deal with it.

Throughout Kubrick’s work, the late 18th-century setting of Barry Lyndon recurs in the oddest places: in the ornate Versailles courtroom in Paths Of Glory, the bedroom beyond the Stargate in 2001, and the sleazy final shot of A Clockwork Orange, hinting at the era’s centrality to his work. Even in this historical period, Kubrick seems to suggest, at the pinnacle of refinement and enlightenment and of artistic and philosophical achievement, the Animal Man walks over a wafer-thin meniscus of civility that lies atop an ocean of bloodshed and violence; any reversion to his own brutishness may pull him under at any moment.

Barry Lyndon is filled with meticulously stage-managed rituals and codified social interactions – courtship, card-game, marriage, duel – all as precisely enacted as minuets, all captured, caged, in perfect frames by a sometimes gliding, more-often stationary camera. The ahistorical zoom-lens Kubrick favours – always withdrawing, rarely approaching, and even then only synthetically, offering only the illusion of intimacy – further serves to restrain Barry from achieving his goals.

When violence finally arrives, this sober, well-mannered camera goes instantly from tripod to hand-held, as happens in the chaotic and shocking beating that Barry administers to Lord Bullingdon at the recital. The illusion of civility is violently curtailed, and Barry’s doom is sealed, leaving him, like many Kubrick protagonists, as primitive and alone as the murderous ape with the bone in 2001.