10. “Cold War” – Lukasz Zal
Although Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal previously worked in black and white to sublime effect on Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Oscar-winning “Ida,” his reunion with the director, if anything, proves the elasticity of the format in capturing an entirely different mood and tone. “Ida”‘s monochromatic frames were characterized by a serene stillness that seemed to emanate from the ethereal purity of Agata Trzebuchowska’s face. And while “Cold War” is no less fascinated by its leading lady, Joanna Kulig, no less magnetized to her throughout, the photography is, just like her character, far less composed and compliant. Taking its cue from the tumultuous nature of this epic love story, there’s a restless musicality that runs through “Cold War” like a jazz bassline, thrumming and pulsing, crescendoing and crashing, but never staying still. Of course there is still an iconic, old-world dimension that the gorgeous, high-contrast chiaruscuro gives — when Viktor (Tomasz Kot) walks away into the city with his collar up he could be a Life Magazine photo of James Dean; when Kulig’s Zula collapses drunk against him in a sloppy tumble of blonde hair she could be a ‘Misfits‘-era Marilyn. But more often Zal’s work here occupies a register all of its own, both woozily classic and slicingly modern, giving every moment of this gorgeously, sexily dysfunctional relationship a beauty that is as ephemeral as it is eternal, in swooning shallow-focus shots that play like a visual echo of the sonic paradox of Kulig’s voice: at once so pure with longing and so smoky with regret. Oy oy oy.
9. “Suspiria” – Sayombhu Mukdeeprom
As many different, extraordinary directors as Sayombhu Mukdeeprom has worked with so far, in often off-kilter, semi-surreal scenarios — he’s a regular collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul‘s including shooting his Palme d’Or-winning “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” and also shot Miguel Gomes‘ sprawling “Arabian Nights” trilogy — you can see why re-teaming with Luca Guadagnino, for his “Suspiria” remake might have been appealing. Not only a stylistic turnaround from sunsplashed ’80s Italy of “Call Me By Your Name,” “Suspiria,” in this reimagining is surely a DP’s white whale, a willfully style-over-substance extravaganza in which the challenge is less about storytelling than it is about showcasing the grotesque in such a way that it tricks the eye in to believing it. There are classic horror-movie sequences, like those skittering nightmare montages of uncannily disturbing dream imagery. But “Suspiria” is more remarkable for its audacious melding of the very lurid with the very drab. So although this is a tale of witches and possession and ancient forces that even predate good and evil, it is bedded into a dour and gray Berlin, and draped in a surprisingly somber color palette of dirty-trench coat beige and liver-spot brown. So the deep red accents really poke your eye out when they come, leading up to the orgiastic finale in which any notion of visual restraint is eviscerated on the altar of gore. Still, even then, as ritualistic and ridiculous as proceedings become, and as elaborate the blocking, lighting and demonic choreography, Mukdeeprom’s camera, grounded and practical and shooting on film, gives “Suspiria” an almost tangible, fleshy reality.
8. “Zama” – Rui Poças
The challenge of Lucrecia Martel’s slyly surreal period piece is that it is ultimately about stasis, about torpidity and enforced inaction over such a long period of time it becomes a kind of derangement. How to absorb us into a story, then, that is by definition almost wholly absent forward momentum? Martel turns to Rui Poças, already something of a Portuguese arthouse superstar having worked on Miguel Gomes’ “Tabu,” Joao Pedro Rojas’ “The Ornithologist” and this year’s “Good Manners” from Marco Dutra and Juliana Rojas, to create a startlingly intricate vision of this remote outpost in 17th century Asunción. Each frame teems with life and menace — despite working in a surprisingly bleachy palette in which cool greens and pale skies are accented by the odd splashes of faded turquoise and pink in the costuming, Poças somehow manages to infuse every vista with layers of information, mood and the sense of things unseen. Whether it’s close-ups of Daniel Giménez Cacho‘s Beckettian hero, his noble features becoming increasingly haunted and ridiculous as the years waste on or sequences tracking some utterly futile expedition or other through the jungle, Poças’ cinematography is what gives “Zama” its singular sense of time. Each frame is so dense with untameable vegetation and the accumulation of years that it feels like Don Diego (and maybe humankind in general) is simply marking time in a future ruin, soon to be reclaimed by nature, with all traces of his petty little life erased.
7. “The Rider” – Joshua James Richards
Cinematographer Joshua James Richards appeared on last year’s cinematography list for Francis Lee’s “God’s Own Country,” in which he infused earthy romance into the damp drizzle and mud of the Yorkshire hills. Chloe Zhao‘s superb “The Rider” is another rural story indebted to big skies and broad pastures, but this time in America, where you cannot show a man on horseback silhouetted against the sky without invoking the spirit of John Ford and man’s-gotta-do western mythology. But despite being set in the ostensibly macho rodeo world, and being so naturalistic in execution that it’s almost docu-fiction, Richards’ photography has a delicacy and sensitivity that from the beginning invests us more in the taciturn Brady’s inner journey than in some more obviously grandiose dramatic arc. So the imagery ranges from beauty shots fit for a classic western — Brady nose-to-muzzle with his horse against a lilac sunset — to kitchen-sink realism, as in all the scenes with his family, or where he examines his head wound in the dingy light of the bathroom mirror. The very ambivalence of Richards’ style here gives the utterly superb “The Rider” its mood of lonely bravery — foreshadowing an ending that is at once anticlimactic and heart-swellingly gratifying in its borderline subversive embrace of life over glory.
6. “Burning” – Hong Kyung-pyo
“To me, the world is a mystery” confesses Jong-su (Yoo Ah-in) at one point in Lee Chang-dong‘s “Burning,” foreshadowing the feelings of so many of us stumbling out of the theater, mesmerized, perplexed and disturbed in equal measure by this slow-burn masterpiece. And the low-key brilliance of Hong Kyung-pyo’s cinematography is a perfect example of the deception the film practices on us, so smoothly and with such ineffable assurance that it is impossible to find the joins. Hong, who also shot Bong Joon-ho‘s hyper-stylish “Snowpiercer” and Na Hong-jin‘s unfeasibly creepy “The Wailing,” uses natural light almost exclusively, but, aside from that one glorious scene where Hae-mi dances topless against the purple twilight while Miles Davis plays and Jong-su’s crush flares into obsession, seldom in pursuit of Malickian pictorial beauty. Instead, his shooting style borders on the banal, rooting us to Jong-su’s down-at-heel perspective, often using the half-light of dawn or dusk to put us in a kind of limbo, and further obscuring the truth of any given situation by shooting seemingly unimportant moments in acutely observed close up, while allowing violence and high drama to unfold far away. These canny, subtly wrong-footing choices are revealed as the film’s enigmatic masterstroke at the climax, by which time we’ve become so attuned to the ordinary rhythms of Jong-su’s lonely, needful life that the sun is going down and it’s almost too late to notice we’re maybe being manipulated by the least reliable of narrators.