“A cinematographer is a visual psychiatrist–moving an audience through a movie […] making them think the way you want them to think, painting pictures in the dark,” said the late, great Gordon Willis. As we continue our year-end coverage, one aspect we must highlight is, indeed, cinematography. From talented newcomers to seasoned professionals, we’ve rounded up the examples that have most impressed us this year.
Aftersun (Gregory Oke)
It’s been seven months since I unassumingly saw Aftersun at an unspeakable morning hour in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that polaroid shot. Just after a photo is taken, the camera cuts to a long, still take of the polaroid image slowly apparating. It’s the shot I’ve thought about most this year (and not just because it’s clever). In narrative context it delivers a heavyweight moment. But in...
Aftersun (Gregory Oke)
It’s been seven months since I unassumingly saw Aftersun at an unspeakable morning hour in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that polaroid shot. Just after a photo is taken, the camera cuts to a long, still take of the polaroid image slowly apparating. It’s the shot I’ve thought about most this year (and not just because it’s clever). In narrative context it delivers a heavyweight moment. But in...
- 12/14/2022
- by The Film Stage
- The Film Stage
With the LA-set robbery-gone-wrong spectacle “Ambulance,” Michael Bay returns to his mayhem roots – that part of his career when he didn’t need a lot of CGI, but still didn’t know how to shoot action cohesively.
Can one be nostalgic for a filmmaker villain’s destructive origins? It might not matter if what you’re really pining for is the authentic gnarl of actual vehicles moving at top speeds on real streets, for multiple genuine collisions and true explosions, in an age when the common fare for thrill-seekers is digitized superheroes and green-screened action.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when directors can’t help themselves; fetishes can be fun! But even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this...
Can one be nostalgic for a filmmaker villain’s destructive origins? It might not matter if what you’re really pining for is the authentic gnarl of actual vehicles moving at top speeds on real streets, for multiple genuine collisions and true explosions, in an age when the common fare for thrill-seekers is digitized superheroes and green-screened action.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing when directors can’t help themselves; fetishes can be fun! But even if you’ve been longing for a more grounded, gritty car-chase movie since the “Fast” franchise left physics behind ages ago, Bay’s addiction to confusion and pointlessness as operating visual/narrative principles keeps even this...
- 3/24/2022
- by Robert Abele
- The Wrap
By the time a publicist signals that my turn has come, director Pietro Marcello has just wrapped his last roundtable interview of the day, and slouches on a sofa at the Excelsior Hotel, peering at the terrace a few steps away from us, and the Adriatic Sea, sprawling bright and calm further down. It’s the midway point of the 76th Venice Film Festival, and the thick late summer air above the Lido is packed with the noise of people besieging the red carpet. A self-taught documentarian (Diy credentials he would proudly and rightfully boast in our interview), Marcello first bowed on the Lido in 2007, when his Crossing the Line found a slot in the Horizons sidebar, before cementing his name in 2009 with The Mouth of the Wolf. Eight years since his 2011 documentary The Silence of Pelesjan world premiered on the Lido—again in the Horizons program—and four since...
- 10/1/2019
- MUBI
It’s fortuitous enough that Edgar Wright‘s films will inspire any number of questions — fairly often along the lines of “how did they even do that?,” admittedly, but one takes what they can get — and all the more fortunate that the writer-director stands among the more verbose and open of his generation. (And that’s to say nothing of those working in the mainstream.) With the latest, Baby Driver, being a praise-worthy bit of craftsmanship from top to bottom and the man himself standing in something of a spotlight, now might be the best time to get his attention.
Although I could’ve thrown inquiry after inquiry at Wright for, say, two hours, our talk was a good bit of ground-covering — an update on how feeling about the progression of his career, where one film feeds into another, and, because it’d be silly to sit down with a...
Although I could’ve thrown inquiry after inquiry at Wright for, say, two hours, our talk was a good bit of ground-covering — an update on how feeling about the progression of his career, where one film feeds into another, and, because it’d be silly to sit down with a...
- 6/27/2017
- by Nick Newman
- The Film Stage
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