15. Paul Thomas Anderson and Lighting Crew – “Phantom Thread”
The review embargo on Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread” is finally up (review here) and so we can safely say it’s yet another masterful work by one of the great living American filmmakers. And leave it up to Anderson to boast one of the most gorgeous-looking movies of the year and not even feature a “proper” cinematographer. Anderson’s said basically all his go-to lensers were busy so he made the effort to just forego a traditional director of photography and instead huddle with his gaffers, electrics and lighting crew to create the ravishing look of the film, which is perhaps a further testament to his genius. What he describes as a team effort is striking and naturally lit to appear that it’s barely lit at all. There’s nothing really overtly, stylistically bold about “Phantom Thread,” and yet it’s incredibly cinematic; while the movie is classically made, with a restrained formalism to its compositions and framing, its simplicity and gracefulness are its own form of beauty. And yet, occasionally, when the moment sees fit, PTA dazzles with some artfully conspicuous shots, but all judiciously used (think of the shot from below as Vicky Krieps puts on the dress that Daniel Day-Lewis’ exacting character demands she model for him). “Phantom Thread” possesses that inexplicable quality that is cinema at its purest, a film crafted in a subtle, unpretentious and mature mode that somehow peers inside the souls of its characters and expresses something mysterious, scintillating and oh so, human, in its twisted, flawed characters.
14. Joshua James Richards – “God’s Own Country”
One of the things that makes Francis Lee‘s exceptional drama unquestionably one of the most exciting debuts of the year is the sheer confidence of its execution, and the richly immersive authenticity of its rural English setting. Beneath its thrilling main love story, there is another, broader love story being told, a genuine feeling for and connection to the land, and to the often harsh and forbidding landscapes of Yorkshire. Joshua James Richards, who had a stellar 2017 also having worked on Chloe Zhao‘s stunning “The Rider” observes that harshness without romancing it to softness: between sweeping wides of misty hills under mottled skies and minute observational details like a puff of sheep’s wool caught on a barbed wire fence, his photography is a windswept, drizzled-damped embrace of a world far removed from the urban lifestyles most of us live. But he also brings that sense of groundedness to the film’s more emotional and visceral moments, whether it’s the first sex scene which feels as mucky and real as it is urgent and passionate, to the later interiors with their glow of unexpectedly intimate domesticity. Cinematography lists are often dominated by the traditionally beautiful and epic, but Richards gradually finds the loveliness in this often bleak setting, just as the characters gradually stumble upon love, and are transformed so radically it beautifies their whole world, without anything materially having changed.
13. Ari Wegner – “Lady Macbeth”
If there’s any category of film that seems to come freighted with an expectation of a certain type of aesthetic, it’s the period costume drama. But here to give the musty, fusty, dusty, chintz-and-damask stateliness of the genre a swift, winding kick to the corsets, is Ari Wegner, shooting William Oldroyd‘s compelling “Lady Macbeth” as though it were piercingly contemporary, and making it feel exactly so as a result. (Indeed, Wegner’s other 2017 project was the thrillingly topical “The Girlfriend Experience“). Riveted to Florence Pugh’s breakout turn, Wegner’s compositions are, certainly in the beginning, often spartan and simple, and modernist in how crisply they frame the period-accurate interiors. Pugh is often set in the exact center of the frame in her iconic blue dress, but as clean and orderly as the surrounding are, they feel oppressive, pushing in at her from all sides. Later, as she discovers herself in an affair with a stablehand, that effect diminishes, and off-center, untidy details begin to creep in as her wantonness takes hold: a crumpled bedsheet, a puddle of hastily removed underwear, a stray strand of hair escaping a rigid bun. There is nothing obviously artificial in terms of the lighting or production design, and yet the effect is gently dislocating, making us understand her (even if we don’t like her) as a woman trapped by the morals and mores of a time she does not belong to — a feeling to which even the most modern of us can perhaps relate.
12. Thimios Bakatakis – “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer”
Sometimes the value of a director/cinematographer partnership can be overstated, but there is perhaps a reason why, of all Yorgos Lanthimos‘ celebrated features since “Kinetta,” “Alps” feels like the most minor: it’s the only one not shot by Thimios Bakatakis. Now, as Lanthimos is prepping his Emma Stone-starring Queen Anne-era period pic “The Favorite” without him, it’s a good time to take a moment to admire perhaps the pinnacle of their partnership, the icily amazing “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” More than most movies this is a film that lives and breathes (in short, fishlike, gasping gulps of air, its true) in its cinematography, which here is rendered in frames of such perfect Kubrickian symmetry and coldness, it feels like they could sterilize surgical instruments. The camera’s eye here is that of an all-seeing God (sometimes literally, looking straight down from vertiginously high overheads), one who stands far away from the horror and mess of these mysteriously interlaced lives and observes them with a remove that is tantamount to actual cruelty. The drained palette, the coldly reflective plate glass surfaces and vanishing-point hospital corridors infuse the film with a terrifyingly antiseptic aesthetic, as though the characters are simply lab rats in a cosmic experiment far beyond their ken — insects under the magnifying glass of a particularly vicious, capricious child. Perhaps only rivalled by “Loveless,” but even shorn of that film’s affinity for human despair, this is without doubt, the meanest cinematography of the year.
11. “Baby Driver”
Cinematographer Bill Pope shot “The Matrix” and ever since he’s been rightly considered a kind of modern god of action cinema. And he’s become a constant collaborator of filmmaker Edgar Wright ever since “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” — it’s a partnership that feels like it won’t end anytime soon. Wright’s dazzling “Baby Driver” is so many movies mashed into one, a romantic love story and fairytale, a heist film, a comedy, an actioner and even a musical. In the wrong hands, this movie could be a tonal mess, but through Wright’s deft hand and Pope’s visual command, it is a seamless, thrilling ride. Camera movement (along with some incredibly sharp editing), make “Baby Driver” glide in romantic musical moments, race by furiously at top speed in action scenes and whip around in the chaos of heists gone wrong. “Baby Driver” is impeccably crafted, shot and framed, there’s an exacting precision to the movie as clean as some of its wild hairpin turns. Admittedly, the film feels like the DNA of Wright and his sensibilities, but Pope is the perfect enabler who helps bring this dynamic imagination to life with a charged kineticism that is simply electric.
