70. “First Man” (2018), Linus Sandgren
The eye-catching, colorful choreography of “La La Land,” Linus Sandgren‘s previous collaboration with Damien Chazelle, tends to get the attention, but it’s his comparatively restrained work here that is the more textured. There are a lot of space movies on this list (sorry about that, personal obsession) but none has the realness — the paradoxical groundedness — of “First Man,” which earns its visceral sense of peril at the ricketyness of the metal tubes we fire at the moon, not through flashy effects but through diligent, intelligent, old-fashioned craft.
69. “Frances Ha” (2012) Sam Levy
It’s not just that “Frances Ha” bursts with color for a black-and-white film, it’s the kind of black and white that DP Sam Levy uses — low-contrast, muted, mid-toned — that is so surprising. It’s partly Noah Baumbach‘s homage to early French New Wave films, but the sensibility is also acutely modern, with Levy’s liberated camera able to keep up even with its awkwardly graceful heroine’s sprinting pace, and to both adore her and find her deeply, endearingly silly. It’s no surprise, given their synergy here, that Gerwig chose Levy as her DP on “Lady Bird.”
68. “Jackie” (2016) Stéphane Fontaine
Pablo Larraín‘s spikily deconstructed biopic of a newly widowed Jackie Kennedy was a departure: his first film in English, first with a major Hollywood star, and first without DP Sergio Armstrong. But just as language is no barrier and Natalie Portman proves superb in the role, the opulent yet brittle photography from Stéphane Fontaine (“Elle,” “Rust & Bone,” the upcoming “Ammonite“) is perfectly attuned to the smashed-crystal-mirror vibe of this eccentric, slyly metatextual riff on fame, image and the manufacture of legacy in the aftermath of tragedy.
67. “Mommy” (2014) André Turpin
We’ve had a… strained relationship with some of Xavier Dolan‘s subsequent films, so it’s good to think back to the sheer exhilaration of “Mommy,” his deeply moving portrait of an antagonistically affectionate mother-son relationship. André Turpin, who also shot the terrific, if far more spartan “Tom at the Farm” brings an exuberance that even earns the show-offiest moments, like when the boxy aspect ratio expands with Antoine-Olivier Pilon‘s outstretched arms as if the picture simply can’t contain the boundless energy this troubled but intensely alive young man can generate.
66 “The Lost City of Z” (2017) Darius Khondji
We could also have chosen master Darius Khondji‘s first collaboration with James Gray, “The Immigrant” but consider the even more dizzying visual heights of “The Lost City of Z”: spanning stately interiors and wild jungle and finally whispering an awestruck farewell through the torchlit darkness, Khondji’s imagery is elastic and eventually transcendent, evoking the wonder we all might hope to feel at the moment of our death. So yeah, it gets my vote — and don’t fear that 2010s Khondji can only do whispery period pictorialism — he also just shot the Safdies‘ pounding pulmonary embolism “Uncut Gems.”
65. “Madeline’s Madeline” (2018) Ashley Connor
This maddening yet extraordinary film from Josephine Decker needs a visual style that can keep up with the impossible, oscillating chaotic-evil/chaotic-good energy of its firecracker lead (a spectacular Helena Howard). Decker’s regular DP Ashley Connor truly rises to the occasion, playing with extreme shallow focus, nervy, often partially obscured closeups and semi-surreal interludes. The resulting mood is strung sky-high, precarious in its relationship to reality just as the wild, wilfully performative Madeline is, while her feverish creativity is encouraged, explored and/or exploited by those around her.
64. “Cemetery of Splendour” (2015) Diego Garcia
Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s follow-up to Palme d’Or winner “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” has the most strikingly strange and lovely cinematography of his career to date. DP Diego Garcia (who recently shot Nicolas Winding Refn‘s “Too Old To Die Young“) gives ‘Cemetery’ the woozy, dreamlike quality we expect from Apichatpong, but it’s punctuated with strikingly memorable images — sickly soldiers sleeping beneath neon tubes that cycle softly through the spectrum; ladies jazzercizing by the river’s edge; a woman grotesquely suckling a man from her misshapen knee — that are beautiful, banal and baffling.
63. “Rojo” (2018) Pedro Sotero
Brazilian DP Pedro Sotero has also done stunning work on all of fellow Brazilian Kleber Mendonça Filho‘s films — “Neighbouring Sounds,” “Aquarius,” “Bacurau” — so it feels a mite disloyal to list his one film with Argentinian director Benjamin Naishtat. But “Rojo” is a cinematographic marvel a deadpan, horror-tinged, ’70’s set satire that employs slow-motion, split diopters, lurid crash zooms and a palette splattered with various hues of the titular red, culminating in a blood-crimson filter used to evoke the uncanny light of a solar eclipse.
62. “The Social Network” (2010) Jeff Cronenweth
As we hurtle toward the end of the decade a hundred times more addicted to our social media habits than we were at the start, David Fincher‘s typically pristine film — the supervillain origin story of Mark Zuckerberg — is getting a moment of retrospective appreciation. And that ought to extend to the contribution from DP Jeff Cronenweth (“Gone Girl,” “Down With Love“) who somehow finds layered, rich, visually inviting ways to frame scenes that could otherwise feel overladen with Aaron Sorkin talkiness or iced over by Fincher’s own almost-palpable disdain.
61. “The Duke of Burgundy” (2014) Nicholas D. Knowland
Peter Strickland‘s kinky, perfumed paean to lepidoptery and sadomasochistic relationships is surely the most seductive film ever to feature a “human toilet” — a commingling of the luxuriant with the debased that works itself deep into Nic Knowland’s photography. Having already shot Strickland’s terrific, sickly “Berberian Sound Studio,” here Knowland belies ‘Burgundy”s polished, antique surfaces with a heady undertone of sweet rot, resulting in a unique aesthetic that glories in the imperfections and deceptions of effortful, constructed beauty: wrinkles beneath make-up, flesh bulging under a corset’s stay, mussed hairs in an otherwise immaculate coiffure.
