A continuing programming vogue for reviving 1970s films on New York’s repertory screens will pay off particularly handsomely this Memorial Day weekend when the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 cinematic treasure “Barry Lyndon.”

Beginning Sunday, the Film Society will unveil a new print of Kubrick’s film that was struck under the supervision of Leon Vitali, the actor who played Lord Bullingdon in “Barry Lyndon” and went on to serve as Kubrick’s assistant and casting associate until the director’s death in 1999.

Kubrick intended to tackle a screen version of the life of Napoleon after 1968’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But producer Dino De Laurentiis’s poorly received 1970 epic “Waterloo” persuaded the director to return to the future for “A Clockwork Orange” and keep the extensive period research he had already accumulated on hand for another project.

Kubrick eventually found inspiration in the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray. The author’s “Vanity Fair” proved to be too sprawling to adapt to an exhibitable length, but “as soon as I read ‘Barry Lyndon,'” Kubrick said to Michel Ciment during a series of interviews in the early 1980s, “I became very excited about it.”

In Thackeray’s 1844 serial “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” low-born Irishman Redmond Barry leaves home, fights on both sides of the Seven Years War, and energetically seeks his own fortune via the fortunes and hearts of gullible and amorously inclined members of the British aristocracy. “I loved the story and the characters,” Kubrick said, “and it seemed possible to make the transition from novel to film without destroying it in the process.”

But the director chose to downplay the book’s bawdier, more picaresque approach in favor of a socially critical and ultimately tragic portrait of a man stripped of illusions and conscience by the tumultuous events and corrupt institutions of his time. Fortuitously, Robert Redford turned down the role of Redmond Barry. Instead, Kubrick signed Ryan O’Neal, an equally bankable star in the eyes of Warner Bros., which shouldered the substantial financial burden for what would become a yearlong shoot on locations in England, Ireland, and Germany. Mr. O’Neal invested his performance in “Barry Lyndon” with a mixture of innocence and arrogance that has a depth and resonance not found in any of the actor’s other work. During the course of the three-hour film, Mr. O’Neal is able to show Redmond Barry’s soul gradually draining from his body like air from a punctured balloon.

Kubrick was, in Mr. Vitali’s words, “a friend of any technology he could make use of.” “2001: A Space Odyssey” employed what was then state-of-the-art optical effects in order to realize the director’s speculative evolutionary fable, and the earthbound dystopia of “A Clockwork Orange” was captured with the help of new lightweight, handheld cameras and sensitive film stocks.

True to form, “Barry Lyndon,” the director’s first period film since 1960’s “Spartacus,” also benefited from pioneering advances in motion picture hardware. By 1975, an ultra-fast converted still-camera lens designed for satellite photography made it possible to authentically capture candle-lit night interior scenes in “Barry Lyndon” with their own natural glow.

“The visual part of filmmaking has always come easiest to me,” Kubrick told Mr. Ciment. “Barry Lyndon” offers spectacular proof of that claim. Its fastidious evocation of 18th-century Europe, in colors and compositions inspired by the work of Gainsborough and other paradigmatic painters of the period, is swoon-inducing. But despite the film’s extravagantly meticulous devising, in a body of work both praised and criticized for romancing technical perfection over character, “Barry Lyndon” stands out as its director’s funniest, most genial, and modest film.

“Barry Lyndon,” in fact, is Stanley Kubrick’s best movie. Why is it better than any other of the legendary director’s more celebrated but emotionally chilly cinematic accomplishments? Because it has heart.

Sunday through Tuesday (165 W. 65th St., between Amsterdam Avenue and Broadway, 212-875-5600).