15. “Annihilation” – Rob Hardy
Several of the cinematographers featured on this list have more than one 2018 title to their name, but it would be hard to find one who worked with a greater disparity of scale than Rob Hardy, who delivered the big-budget action and fantastic fisticuffs of “Mission: Impossible – Fallout” and also re-teamed with Alex Garland, after “Ex Machina” for the much smaller, and much, much stranger “Annihilation.” Hardy’s style for Garland’s existential sci-fi is curiously airless. That’s a word that would normally be a pejorative, but there is something in Garland’s imagined worlds — even ones that teem with lush vegetation and mutated fauna — that lends itself to a certain clinical sterility in execution. The overt artificiality is part of what makes the film so uncanny, and indeed inside The Shimmer, where most of the action takes place, physics, biology, and chemistry all behave differently, and so the stifled, hothoused effect feels appropriate. It is also what makes the more viscerally gory scenes, such as the terrific bear attack, all the more effective and grotesque, while ramping up to a climax that feels like it might be taking place on another planet, or in a refracted, shattered version of our own reality, or in a particularly deranged and yet strangely uncluttered subconscious. Hardy’s imagery did really deserve to be seen on the big screen, but not so much because of the scale of the shot-making, as for the ambition of the concepts that underpin it.
14. “A Quiet Place” – Charlotte Bruus Christensen
Though they’re both high-concept horrors set largely in motion by the death of a child, John Krasinski’s “A Quiet Place” could not be more different from Ari Aster’s “Hereditary” (see below). And a great deal of that differentiation comes from the visual approach which in Danish cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen’s 35mm imagery has more in common with early Spielberg than with classic horror. Turning a story about aliens with uncannily acute hearing into a family drama about resilience might seem counter-intuitive, but Christensen, who is better known for prestige dramas like “Fences,” “Far From The Madding Crowd” and the insanely tense “The Hunt” brings an almost old-fashioned elegance to the shot-making that invests us more in the personalities within rather than the threat without. Of course the “gimmick” of the film (its relative soundlessness, which also made it such a peculiarly perfect theatrical experience) means that the pictures have to stand up to closer, deeper scrutiny than they ordinarily might and Christensen’s meticulous, analogue approach feels like an inspired choice, wherever possible eschewing CG and instead, palpably communicating the claustrophobia of the interiors, and the menace lurking in the nighttime shadows just outside the little pools of feeble torchlight, through old-school lighting tricks and practical effects.
13. “A Star Is Born” – Matthew Libatique
It’s easy to recall the exact moment at which Bradley Cooper remaking tired old chestnut “A Star is Born” as his directorial debut with Lady Gaga as his co-star, stopped seeming like a terrible idea: it is approximately 90 seconds into the opening scene. Cooper, as gravel-voiced musician Jackson Maine is on stage swigging a tumbler of liquor and rasping out “Black Eyes,” a fairly standard rock track with a catchy, crunchy bass riff. But with Matthew Libatique’s kinetic, whirlwind camerawork picking out flares from the footlights, giving us dazzled, blurry impressions of the berserker crowd beyond and taking in Cooper’s megawatt grin as he exchanges conspiratorial looks with his band between choruses, “A Star is Born” is truly born. The opening concert is as convincing, energetic and seductive a portrayal of the sheer intoxication of rock stardom as we’ve seen, and it makes sense of everything that comes after, of all the ways that people will ruin themselves and others chasing this kind of high. Even when the action moves offstage, Libatique’s approach is rock’n’roll, imbuing those early scenes between Gaga’s Ally and Cooper’s Maine with a gritty, lo-fi, restless glamour redolent of 1970s independent cinema. But “A Star Is Born” is — whatever the Globes say — a true musical, in that it is a story that reaches its apex of emotional connection through song, and each time either one of them is onstage Libatique’s cinematography takes on an almost mythic dimension that works on the same kind of deception as the most thrilling live gig, in making its artistry seem effortless, dashed-off, spontaneous.
12. “Museo” – Damián García
Way, way too low on the 2018 Best-of radar in most craft categories (Tomas Barreíro‘s score is an absolute treat, and Gael García Bernal‘s performance is one of his most hangdog-endearing too) Alonzo Ruizpalacios‘ shaggy dog retelling of the robbery of precious artifacts from a Mexican museum, is one of the most purely entertaining films of the year. Starring García Bernal as the hapless thief, the Berlin Best Screenplay-winner should also be a breakout for DP Damián García, who shoots every scene with exactly enough knowing referentialism to be cheeky, but not so much it becomes derivative. In fact, with a heist sequence that riffs on “Rififi,” chase scenes that nod to Hitchcock and then some oddly melancholic caper beats that feel equal parts “Pierrot le Fou” and “Badlands,” part of the pleasure is finding out which classic García’s deliciously throwback, deeply textured 35mm photography is going to tip its hat to next. And anyway, García’s constant, fidgety visual reimagining of the movies he and Ruizpalacios are homaging is ultimately more than justified by the central theme of this playful, borderline metafictional narrative: it’s all about truth and fakery, and about how authenticity can be either priceless or worthless, depending on the eye of the beholder.
11. “Hereditary” – Pawel Pogorzelski
There was certainly no other film in 2018, and very possibly no other film in recent memory, that danced so delicately and diabolically at the very limit of what the human eye can actually discern in the dark. Pawel Pogorzelski, working with first-time director Ari Aster, approached this ready-minted classic with such literally dark artistry that some critics were reaching to define the film as something other than a horror. That’s ridiculous, of course, but it’s a testament to how good a horror “Hereditary” is that it almost seems to invent a new category. Part of the reason the film’s cinematography is so intrinsic to its effectiveness is that Pogorzelski was involved in the project practically from its inception, and it tells in how many of its creepiest moments and most disquieting sequences are purely visual. From the visceral, horribly plausible anguish of the car crash, to the shape that may or may not even be there, crouching in the upper corner of Peter’s bedroom, to the uncannily unsettling day-to-night snap-cuts of the house’s exterior, “Hereditary” might feel fresh and new, but it is actually just a terrific well-thought-through repository of many of the oldest of horror’s masochistic pleasures, like frantically searching the frame to prepare yourself for the next jump scare, and then being scared shitless when it happens anyway.