50. “Certified Copy” (2010) Luca Bigazzi
Luca Bigazzi’s most emblematic work is probably with Paolo Sorrentino on 2013’s bacchanalian “The Great Beauty.” But in Abbas Kiarostami’s playful late-career triumph, his gleefully bourgeois aesthetic of attractive, cultured people wandering around beautiful, cultured locations is jolted out of complacency by a tricksy storyline that keeps you examining the lovely frames for the joins between real and fictional. The film preaches a more-than-meets-the-eye parable, making Bigazzi’s photography here as beautiful and enigmatically mischievous as Juliette Binoche’s sudden private smiles.
49. “Foxcatcher” (2015) Greig Fraser
Low-lit and foreboding, Greig Fraser’s mournfully restrained photography in Bennett Miller’s cautionary tale of wealth, isolation and jealousy is an unusual choice for such a salacious story. But Fraser, who also shot the fervently downbeat “Rogue One” as well as “The Mandalorian” and the upcoming “Dune” and “The Batman” reboots, brings a grace and a gravitas to the misty exteriors and sepulchral interiors of John DuPont’s mansion-prison, making “Foxcatcher” less a true-crime mystery than a real-life Greek tragedy set in the fading light of the American Dream.
48. “Inception” (2010) Wally Pfister
Wally Pfister’s long-term collaboration with Christopher Nolan reached a sort of pinnacle with “Inception” — a film that any other director might have treated as a palette-cleanser between massive “Dark Knight” franchise outings. But Nolan gonna Nolan, and instead “Inception” was his most ambitious — and most visually intricate — film to that date. Pfister’s glossy, minutely detailed style rose to the challenge of depicting dreams within dreams with stunning clarity against often breathtakingly epic backdrops. If only our actual dreams played out in such exquisitely art-directed High-Definition.
47. “12 Years a Slave” (2013) Sean Bobbitt
A man dangles at the end of a rope just barely long enough for him to stand on tiptoes to relieve the crushing of his windpipe. From a cool remove, we watch him struggle against exhaustion while children play, slaves go about their work and a white woman watches from a porch. This shot, in just under three excruciating minutes, is all you need to know about DP Sean Bobbitt and director Steve McQueen’s unflinching approach: in not allowing us to look away from the suffering of one man, they evoke the suffering of millions, and speak volumes on the inhuman abomination that is slavery.
46. “45 Years” (2015) Lol Crawley
The unassuming modesty of Lol Crawley‘s cinematography in Andrew Haigh‘s haunting dissection of a crumbling marriage is easy to undersell — its brilliance exists not in visual pyrotechnics but in the furtive, subtle angling that subliminally nudges our attention this way and that. It is a masterclass in framing and blocking so that a momentary glance can become a thunderclap of tectonic emotional upheaval, and fleeting expression of desolation on Charlotte Rampling‘s face can write a brokenhearted saga of loss across the damp Norfolk fields.
45. “Meek’s Cutoff” (2010) Christopher Blauvelt
Christopher Blauvelt has worked with Kelly Reichardt on all her films of the 2010s, and each time has brought her uniquely spare, lonesome vision to life. But “Meek’s Cutoff” might just be their finest collaboration — a taciturn, slow-paced frontier-times Western that feels crisply modernist in sensibility. Blauvelt (who trained under the great Harris Savides) takes classic wagon-trail iconography and subtly reinvents it, doing honor not only to the windswept prairie and cracked desert landscapes, but to the domestic travails of the female pioneers— the fabrics, the cooking-pots, the restrictiveness of their bonnets—in a way that John Ford never dreamed of.
44. “The Raid” (2011)/”The Raid 2″ (2014), Matt Flannery & Dimas Imam Subhono
This double-entry is a cheat, but both Gareth Evans‘ ‘Raid’s’ were shot by the same DP duo, with the sequel starting literally two hours after the first one ended, so we’re letting it go. Cinematographically, they feel like a continuous entity too: the genius of “The Raid” is in the containment of its setting, but when that insanely inventive martial-arts athleticism explodes out into the world in “The Raid 2” somehow Flannery & Subhono lose none of their control over the brutal yet balletic, adrenaline-charged action.
43. “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013) Rodrigo Prieto
It’s almost perverse to choose Scorsese’s brilliantly tacky, OTT, bubble-gum-colored Wall Street satire as representative of superstar DP Rodrigo Prieto‘s work, which is more usually characterized by restraint, gravitas and a kind of earthy but haunted beauty (viz “Silence,” “The Irishman,” “Biutiful” and “Brokeback Mountain.”) But that’s partly why ‘Wolf’ is such a kick: there’s such a liberated, giddy, coke-and-quaaludes glee in these popping visuals that you could almost mistake it for glamorizing Jordan Belfort’s vacuously excessive lifestyle. If, that is, you were very bad at watching movies.
42. “Inherent Vice” (2015) Robert Elswit
Imagine the level at which you have to operate for your deranged and hilarious adaptation of Thomas Pynchon‘s drugged-up sunshine noir to rank as somewhat minor in your canon. That’s true for Paul Thomas Anderson, and also for DP Robert Elswit (“Nightcrawler,” “Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol“) whose previous PTA collaboration “There Will Be Blood” casts such a long, oily shadow. We’re happy to redress the injustice a little and celebrate this great and goofy, turned-on, tuned-in, blissed-out, bummed-out vision of a doomed 1970 LA beach lifestyle that only be described as molto panekeku.
41. Ad Astra (2019) Hoyte van Hoytema
Now a byword for “epic” (which may not be strictly fair considering his scaled-down work on “Her,” “The Fighter” and “Let the Right One In“) Dutch-Swedish cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema has been into space twice this decade. But while Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” is appropriately grand, it’s in James Gray‘s “Ad Astra” that van Hoytema’s images approach transcendence. Amid moon pirate chases and space baboon attacks, are quiet, sacrosanct moments — space helmet reflections resembling eyes dilating in wonder — in which you almost feel your fingertips brush against the underside of the stars.
