15. “The Lobster” – Thimios Bakatakis
Surrealism, thy name is Thimios. Reteaming with his “Dogtooth” director Yorgos Lanthimos for a cryptically comic and purposely austere story about dystopian love and desire in “The Lobster,” Thimios Bakatakis has broken his own creative ceiling and created a painterly masterpiece — one that is designed to be admired from a distance. Describing the film’s voyeuristic feel, Lanthimos explained how he and Bakatakis “used long lenses, and a few times very wide-angle lenses — extreme choices. We created a visual language that we felt was particular to this film.” The motifs of monotonous love are found in the colorless hues of the skyline and the beige entrapment of the wheat field from which our two heroes (Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz) wish to escape from, and the gaudy lighting of the film’s hotel wherein loners are turned into animals. Most of what our eyes get accustomed to in the film’s first half stand in direct contrast to the exuberant greens of the forest, evoking unbridled freedom. There’s much to be said about a cinematographer who has been so instrumental in evoking the look of the Greek Weird Wave (he also shot “Attenberg”) and who has found a plausible way to make things look even weirder. Thankfully, Lanthimos and Bakatakis will be working again for the director’s next film, “The Killing Of A Sacred Deer,” and we’re positively reeling with anticipation.
14. “The Witch” – Jarin Blaschke
As an addition to our future sequel feature on the most visually stunning horror films, “The Witch” squelches your innards with a tension reaped from Blaschke’s glorious photography. No other horror film (barring, perhaps, “The Love Witch” — what’s the deal with gorgeous witch stories this year?) paralyzed us in the way the pitch darkness conjured up in the film’s New England-set forest does. Chilling to the bone, with an atmosphere that starts to almost reek from the stench of fear halfway through, Blaschke’s impressive work has turned many heads this year — most notably because no one was familiar with him before. Having only worked on a few feature films that flew under all radars, the visual look in “The Witch” had no pre-existing expectations to meet, making the elemental candle-lit interiors, ominous overcast skies, mesmeric close-ups and subtly possessed camera movements all the more profound and effective. The young DP has clearly found a good partner in director Robert Eggers, their combined forces transporting us to the 1600s and turning “The Witch” into what’s arguably the greatest horror experience of 2016. Next up for Blaschke is crime caper “Shimmer Lake” with Rainn Wilson, and Rodrigo Cortés’ “Down A Dark Hall,” and something tells us this cinematographer’s star is just beginning to rise.
13. “One More Time With Feeling” – Benoît Debie & Alwin H. Küchler
Ostensibly a music documentary about the recording of Nick Cave’s new album Skeleton Tree, there’s a sense in which “One More Time With Feeling” should have no business being as beautiful as it is. But as soon as you realize that this is about as far from a vérité, rough-and-ready rock doc as can be imagined, it all starts to make a lot more sense — from the luscious, licorice black-and-white photography to the surprising choice of 3D. Indeed, Benoît Debie, one half of the DP team that director Andrew Dominik chose for the project, has become kind of the go-to guy for projects that surprisingly choose 3D, having shot both of Wim Wenders‘ recent experiments with the format and prior to that been responsible for some of the more avant-garde, trippy excesses of visualists like Harmony Korine and Gaspar Noé. Alwin H. Küchler, for his part, has just as illustrious a CV if a slightly less experimental one, having worked often with Lynne Ramsay (“Ratcatcher,” “Morvern Callar“) and Danny Boyle (the gorgeous lensing of “Sunshine” and chilly precision of “Steve Jobs” are both his work) among many others. However it was they worked together here, the effect is seamless and breathtaking, with the film taking shape as one of the most extraordinary and moving investigations into the interrelation of grief and art ever made, and the beautiful, curious camera, sliding around the studio and seeking out the darkest corners of Cave’s story only to soar up into the light again, is an irreplaceable part of it.
12. “The Neon Demon” – Natasha Braier
Nicolas Winding Refn’s latest offering didn’t disappoint in ruffling a few feathers, but not even the film’s biggest haters could deny its wide-eye-opening, decadent and color-copious beauty. Conjured up by the film’s cinematographer Natasha Braier (who landed at #15 on our50 Most Exciting Working Cinematographers list), “The Neon Demon” is “Alice In Wonderland” meets “Suspiria” by way of “Project Runway,” with a visual imagination that proves a worthy competitor to all three. Bespeckled by a creative orgy of flares, and sublime neon splatters of magenta, lilac, turquoise and violet at every turn, ‘Neon Demon’ has inspired the best work Braier has done in her career thus far. Sordid images of death, necrophilia, and Elle Fanning’s tumble down the insanity-inducing rabbit hole of fashion are forever etched in our minds thanks to Braier’s sensational work with light and shadow, which was inspired to the point of her rubbing Vaseline on the lenses to reflect Refn’s distorted world. “A lot of the film is about light and darkness and how all this darkness makes the light seem to shine brighter,” Braier explains in this brilliant Filmmaker Magazine interview — a perfectly apt description of Refn’s vision, and even that doesn’t do justice to the visual wonder on screen. No words really can.
11. “Silence” – Rodrigo Prieto
Although he’s received one Oscar nomination (“Brokeback Mountain”), director of photography Rodrigo Prieto has an amazing body of work that includes Spike Lee’s “25th Hour” (absolutely mesmerizing, watch it again), “21 Grams,” “Babel,” “Lust, Caution” and “Argo,” though he has yet to be recognized as among today’s modern greats (hopefully, we rectified this a little with our 50 Best Cinematographers Working Today feature). His second collaboration with Martin Scorsese — yes, he was behind the insane camera moves and look of “The Wolf Of Wall Street,” and they’ve actually worked together three times, if you count Prieto shooting the Scorsese-directed pilot of “Vinyl” — Prieto’s work on the Italian-American master’s “Silence” is often breathtaking. Shrouded in mists, engulfed in darkness only broken by torches flickering desperately, it all looks fittingly austere, and even broken when necessary, and Prieto’s lensing is the really the film’s MVP (okay, Andrew Garfield and Adam Driver are pretty good, too). At nearly three hours in length, Scorsese’s movie is solemn, rigorous and not for all audiences. But if you’re looking for an ascetic experience couched in some of the most gorgeous-to-look-at images of the year, Prieto’s work delivers, astoundingly so (and take note, he’s also shooting Scorsese’s upcoming mob film, “The Irishman”).