An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, Barry Lyndon. To reproduce

An interesting case study that's recently had me revising my views on Kubrick's obsessiveness is one of his less-appreciated films, Barry Lyndon. To reproduce the not-yet-electrified world of its 18th-century setting, Kubrick famously spent huge amounts of time on that project finding ways to shoot scenes using only natural light (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Lyndon#Cinematography). This went so far as shooting interior scenes set at night using only candlelight, since that's how they would have been lit in real life. Cameras aren't really designed to work well with such low and inconsistent lighting, so he had to go to great lengths to get usable footage. Ever since its release, the standard take on Barry Lyndon has been that the results didn't justify all that effort. The unusually low lighting made scenes seem willfully obscure, like Kubrick was capriciously forcing the viewer to work extra hard just to keep up. This (along with a sadly weak performance by Ryan O'Neal in the critical role of the eponymous Barry) is a big part of why Barry Lyndon has languished for decades in the "lesser Kubrick" bargain bin. But a recent remastering has produced a 4K version of Barry Lyndon, and I was surprised to discover when watching that version on a large TV that suddenly the film popped visually in a way it never had before. Where before it had seemed dark and hard to watch, now it felt more like observing a great painting, with lots of subtle detail I'd never noticed before. And then I realized that all those years of bad feelings about Barry Lyndon had come from watching it in low resolution on small screens, while Kubrick had been shooting for the big, bright cinema screen. I'd literally been watching the movie wrong all that time. So it turns out Kubrick's obsessiveness in this case really did pay off. Those of us who'd only ever seen it on home video -- which is to say, most people -- just had to wait for the quality of the home viewing experience to catch up to his standards in order to see it.