10. “Tangerine” (2015) Sean Baker, Radium Cheung
Long the province of ad hoc festival competitions and art student graduation projects, the iPhone camera spawned its first truly compelling feature film with Sean Baker‘s “Tangerine.” And with respect to Steven Soderbergh‘s “Unsane,” it remains the best, most joyous example — not just because Baker and Radium Cheung‘s imagery is so poppingly colorful and energetic, but because it feels like a technological choice derived organically from the grimy, street-level glamor of its locations and its scrappily soulful central duo, as they bicker and grift and dream while the sun sets on Sunset.
9. 1917 (2019) Roger Deakins
Deakins is world-renowned, but in Sam Mendes’ WWI drama — crafted as one long “how the hell did they do that?” shot — his techniques and skills are breathtakingly immersive. An emotional, race-against-time movie, cleverly stitched together from several long takes, the bravura camerawork and choreography is astounding, doing justice to a thrilling story, and building to a matchless sequence set among the burning ruins of a French village where fire and explosions crescendo into a heartstopping hellish symphony of light and shadow that seems straight out of Dante’s Inferno. Expect another Oscar win imminently. — Rodrigo Perez
8. “The Master” (2012) Mihai Malaimare Jr.
Paul Thomas Anderson is the best-represented director on this list as his cinematography is not only consistently masterful, it’s wildly different, one film to the next. But “The Master” is his highest entry because of the enigmatic, onyx perfection of its deeply saturated 70mm and 35mm imagery, from DP Mihai Malaimare Jr. (“Jojo Rabbit“). Somehow the pictures conceal as much as they reveal, echoing the sinister secretiveness of Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s charismatic charlatan, and indeed of a film which repels all attempts at full understanding even as it seduces you into its twisted world.
7. “Under the Skin” (2013) Daniel Landin
The most graphically striking images in Jonathan Glazer‘s masterpiece of mindfuckery are abstract: the Kubrick-ian pinprick of light that becomes a planetary aurora that turns into a human eye; the black ooze that reduces Scarlet Johansson‘s alien’s prey to ghostly empty casings; the nightmarish, skin-peeling finale. But the other side to Daniel Landin‘s cinematography is just as crucial — the forlorn, ordinary, Glaswegian gray backdrop heightens the uncanniness, and gives the film — and probably the decade— its most stomach-droppingly upsetting shot, as an abandoned baby cries while the cold tide laps closer on a stony beach.
6. “Carol” (2015), Edward Lachman
The creamy dazzle of Todd Haynes’ gorgeous love story is so enveloping it can feel like the only way to shoot a 1950s-set romantic melodrama. But just compare Ed Lachman‘s also outstanding work on Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” which finds a sharper, brittle edge to Sirkian technicolor, as befits its harder-edged story. “Carol,” by contrast, primarily a swooning romance, is all softness and sighs: this is imagery that blooms like a blush on a cheek, and that feels almost indecently good against the skin, like being naked under a fur coat.
5. “The Tree of Life” (2011), Emmanuel Lubezki
Lubezki had already worked with Terrence Malick, on the sublimely beautiful “The New World,” but it is his imagery (and that of 2nd unit DP Peter Simonite who shot the emblematic infant’s foot image) for Malick’s questing, questioning, millennia-spanning Palme d’Or-winner that really ignites the film. Even those who find its philosophizing pretentious cannot deny the mesmerizing power of pictures that create their own philosophy: Chivo’s work here is so entrancing that one could almost argue that Malick’s next few films lost themselves within it.
4. “Moonlight“ (2016), James Laxton
Tarell Alvin McCraney‘s play, the basis for Barry Jenkins‘ heartbreaking Best Picture winner, is called “In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” In “Moonlight”, black boys (and girls) are indeed sometimes blue, and often washed in purple, and sea-green and a gorgeous, muted neon pink. James Laxton who reteamed with Jenkins in a different, goldeny register for “If Beale Street Could Talk” operates in a whole palette of color that somehow always comes back to a refrain of blueness, that is both literally and metaphorically perfect for the story’s bruised, bluesy sensitivity.
3. “Melancholia” (2011), Manuel Alberto Claro
Striking the right visual tone for Lars Von Trier‘s hymn to apocalyptic depression cannot have been easy, yet Manuel Alberto Claro somehow finds an entire inverse-rainbow spectrum of mood within the engulfing, awestruck pessimism of the project. Nervy handheld; extreme slow-motion; abstract, new-Age celestial imagery; and painterly, classical stillness all have their place, culminating in those unforgettable tableaux of Kirsten Dunst in a wedding dress struggling against the choking weeds of doom like a latter-day Ophelia, that instill an operatic grandeur into Von Trier’s bleakly despairing vision.
2. “Ida“ (2013), Łukasz Żal & Ryszard Lenczewski
In general terms, it is possible to prefer Pawel Pawlikowski‘s follow-up “Cold War,” also gorgeously shot by Łukasz Żal, to his 2013 Best Foreign Language Oscar-winner. But there can be little argument that in “Ida,” which Żal shot with Ryszard Lenczewski, the serene, borderline transcendent cinematography is the crowning achievement, with its crisply lyrical close-ups and almost hyperreal black-and-white compositions elevating the simple story of a young nun discovering her Jewish background onto the plane of the holy.
1. “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), John Seale
There were a million unlikely things about George Miller‘s return to the “Mad Max” fray. It was unlikely that Miller, latterly better known for movies about talking pigs and dancing penguins, would turn in such a thrilling, instant action classic. It was unlikely that Max’s return would be in such an unabashedly feminist reworking of the traditionally macho diesel-in-the-desert cult franchise. And it was highly unlikely that septuagenarian John Seale, then best known for pretty dramas like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “The English Patient” (as well as a couple of well-shot howlers like “The Tourist” and “Dreamcatcher“) would come out of retirement to give this legit insane project a whirl. But maybe it was his unlikeliness as DP of choice here that has this film sit atop our decade rankings for cinematography: in every gorgeous, explosively colorful, colorfully explosive shot, Seale seems to be reinventing the lexicon of action cinema imagery in a way perhaps only someone without a tried-and-tested box of action-movie tricks to fall back on could have. Instead, within voluptuous sandy vistas, the complex choreography of a car chase takes on an almost mythological aspect, a nighttime attack plays in abstract, monochromatic, deep-blue silhouette, and amid beautiful, belching fumes, flame-yellow and hot orange, “Mad Max: Fury Road” rides eternal, shiny and chrome.
Honorable Mention
As many as we’ve mentioned, either in their own entries or as a brief shout-out within a different entry, there are at least as many again that we could have selected. Here are a few that pained us to leave off/that were at one point included: “The Revenant” by Emmanuel Lubezki, “Wuthering Heights” shot by Robbie Ryan, Lol Crawley‘s work on “Vox Lux,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” (Ben Richardson), “Get Out,” (Toby Oliver), “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (Hoyte van Hoytema), “20th Century Women” (Sean Porter), “All These Sleepless Nights” (Michai Marczak), “At Eternity’s Gate” (Benoit Delhomme), “The Beguiled,” and “The Grandmaster,” (Philippe le Sourd), “Blackhat” (Stuart Dryburgh), “Bridge of Spies” (Janusz Kaminski), “A Cure for Wellness” (Bojan Bazelli), “The Mountain” (Lorenzo Hagerman), “A Most Violent Year” (Bradford Young), “Force Majeure” (Fredrik Wenzel), “First Reformed” (Alexander Dynan), “Entertainment” (Lorenzo Hagerman), “The Florida Project” (Alexis Zabe) and “I Am Love,” “Only Lovers Left Alive,” and “Little Women” by Yorick LeSaux.
But, eye of the beholder and all — what do you think we missed?
