40. “Winter’s Bone” (2010) Michael McDonough
There’s a deceptive level of difficulty in walking the line between the docu-real authenticity of social realism and the enhanced romance and richness of thriller-ish drama. But Michael McDonough finds a perfectly unobtrusive balance between a glowy warmth and a bone-chilling frostiness in his rugged, harshly beautiful photography for Debra Granik‘s “Winter’s Bone” (and again in Granik’s follow-up “Leave No Trace“), which is both a gripping, sinister mystery and a deeply compassionate portrait of the hardships of a poverty-stricken, meth-ridden Ozarks community steeling itself for the first snows of winter.
39. “Lady Macbeth” (2017) Ari Wegner
There is a certain way that period melodramas are supposed to look— lavish, cluttered and chintzy, full of lacy details and rattling china. But no one told Ari Wegner (“In Fabric“), because her stunningly stripped-back imagery for William Oldroyd‘s transgressive “Lady Macbeth” is an exercise in almost fetishistic period minimalism. Framed symmetrically in bare rooms or cutting a lonely figure on windswept moors, Florence Pugh‘s timid young bride gradually comes into her murderous, passionate own, and Wegner’s camera observes her shedding her victimhood with a detached fascination that becomes our own.
38. “Phantom Thread” (2017), Paul Thomas Anderson and camera crew
Paul Thomas Anderson has always worked closely with his cinematographers, but it was not until his lovingly tailored “Phantom Thread” that he used no DP at all (he’s got the uncredited title, but he’s modestly described it as a team effort with his grips and electrical crew). The silky folds of his luxuriant images are neatly pressed and invisibly hemmed in scenes so complete and polished that when this ostensible drama finally—only in the very back stretch—pulls the tastefully expensive rug from under our feet and reveals itself as the most offbeat of romantic comedies, it feels like discovering a secret message woven into a piece of embroidery. It’s an honor and a wicked pleasure to be so comprehensively, elaborately, beautifully tricked.
37. “Pina” (2011) Hélène Louvart & Jörg Widmer
If Wim Wenders’ dazzling 3D tribute to Pina Bausch were just a standard bio-doc, however spectacular the dancing, the cinematography would hardly be that notable. But “Pina” is deeply involved in being more than a mere record of someone else’s art, and so co-DPs Hélène Louvart (“Happy as Lazzaro“) and Jörg Widmer (“A Hidden Life“) play a vital role in achieving the optical illusions, sight gags and odd juxtapositions that can only happen when Bausch’s inimitable choreography is dancing a sublime and witty pas de deux with the camera.
https://youtu.be/CNuQVS7q7-A
36.”Drive” (2011) Newton Thomas Sigel
There are bigger and smaller films on this list, flashier and more subdued, but there probably isn’t a single title cooler than Nicolas Winding Refn‘s career-defining neon-noir, as uncool as that is to say. And a lot of that is because of the oil-slick sleazy glamor of Newton Thomas Sigel’s gorgeous, ’70s-inspired photography. Color-blocked to perfection with accents of deep red and turquoise, his seamy images have a dark, seductive luster but come with a scorpion-sting of brutality in the tail, just like Ryan Gosling‘s brooding Driver.
35. “Suspiria” (2018) Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
Most cinematographers work across styles, but even so, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom was a ballsy choice for “Suspiria.” Known for the exotic banality of Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s “Uncle Boonmee…” and the lush Italophile romance of Luca Guadagnino‘s “Call Me By Your Name,” suddenly Mukdeeprom had us flailing around in the hyper-stylized grotesquerie of Guadagnino’s Argento remake — less giallo than a kind of sickly, yeast-infection mustard color. Bone-snapping dance routines; writhing maggots; toilets clogged with hair — these are gorgeously grisly, cursed images that very possibly hex you just to look at them.
34. “Listen Up Philip” (2014) Sean Price Williams
We’re spoiled for choice when it comes to Sean Price Williams — any one of his collaborations with the Alex Ross Perry (“Queen of Earth,” “Her Smell“) or with the Safdies (“Heaven Knows What,” “Good Time“) could have cropped up here (“Thirst Street” is terrific too). But we’ll go with Perry’s “Listen Up Philip” in part because it was the first time we really became aware of how Williams’ unmistakable style — the almost intrusively close close-ups, the slightly fuzzy, antiquey grain — can play such an active storytelling role. Perry’s film is about a self-absorbed narcissist asshole (Jason Schwartzman) but his character is made both more ridiculous and more real by the inescapable, up-close-and-personal proximity of the camera.
33. “Black Panther” (2018) Rachel Morrison
A bullshit record was finally broken in 2018 when Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated for a Best Cinematography Oscar. But we’re choosing her stellar work on “Black Panther” to celebrate here — not because her work on the Marvel megahit (reteaming with Ryan Coogler after “Fruitvale Station,”) is inherently better than her more stately Oscar-nommed photography for Dee Rees‘ “Mudbound.” It’s simply that within the often stifling framework of the MCU, she and Coogler were somehow able to craft a film with its own personality and its own elegant, idiosyncratic visual ideas, while still delivering the franchise action goods, a feat that’s not just unusual, it’s borderline miraculous. Wakanda Forever.
32. “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” (2011), Gökhan Tiryaki
Nuri Bilge Ceylan‘s brooding 2011 crime-drama road movie liberates his regular cinematographer Gökhan Tiryaki‘s images from the talky didacticism of his more recent “hits,” “Winter Sleep” and “The Wild Pear Tree.” Instead, ‘Anatolia’ is a tale told less in words than in gorgeous, fatalistic, directionally-lit pictures, in Tiryaki’s striking portraiture of desperate, exhausted men on an existential hunt for a body buried in the darkened Anatolian countryside, illuminated mostly by candlelight, sweeping car headlamps or the occasional lightning storm. This is philosophical arthouse filmmaking given a mythic edge, earning the echoes of fairytales and classic westerns in the title.
31. “Columbus” (2017) Elisha Christian
When you look at an architect’s plans, the structure, however hulking it might be when finally built, looks delicate — almost ghostly — rendered in a tracery of fine lines and symbols. Elisha Christian‘s immaculately serene photography in Kogonada’s wonderful debut recalls these clean, skeletal drawings in how precisely its symmetries and asymmetries work, so that not just the easily overlooked modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana seem suddenly fascinating and beautiful, but the even finer lines of tentative connection between John Chu‘s visitor and Haley Lu Richardson‘s local are made briefly, shimmeringly visible.
