The Fifties for 2010: Best Cinematography

Following my picks for the best directors and screenplays. And no, despite costume and hair, Ben Stiller and Tahar Rahim were not separated at birth, though I'd love to see Rahim's take on Roger Greenberg.



Robbie Ryan for Fish Tank, for the intimacy and the claustrophobia in his 4:3 framings, achieving crackling color, light, and composition within social-realist bounds;

Harris Savides for Greenberg, for making Angeleno sunrays bland, merciless, and offhandedly enchanting in different scenes, and signaling unspoken affects so eloquently;

Yorick Le Saux for I Am Love, for unbombastic floridity, tweaking old styles with modern agitations and candor, and proving as chameleonic as Tilda in their two collabos;

Martin Gschlacht for Lourdes, whose crisp lenses and chipper colors evoke banal artifice, yet he coaxes uncanny depths from slow movements, patience, and eerie closeups; and

Stéphane Fontaine for A Prophet, who traverses a wild array of palettes and visual environments, grotty to sun-drenched, but coheres them through sustained visual energy.

Extremely honorable mentions to five runners-up who offered such strong work I'd consider them an above-average field in and of themselves: Michael McDonough's cold, steely, location-specific lensing of Winter's Bone, with some exciting departures from realism; Pawel Edelman's deliciously sinister handling of depth, framing, and geometrically blocked spaces in The Ghost Writer; Thimios Bakatatakis's tense, unsettling synthesis of Buñuel, Arbus, and Haneke in Dogtooth; Bernhard Keller's subtlety with flesh tones and bodily movements under the Italian sun in Everyone Else; and Adam Arkapaw's hot white silhouettes and precise framing in Animal Kingdom, which also handles close-ups very well as long as they're not gratuitously heavy on the zoom.

Further honorable mentions to Hong Pyung-kyo's vivid lingering on faces and colors, such that Mother seems controlled but ever-ready to go berserk; Barry Ackroyd's dependably active camerawork and deft nighttime shooting in Green Zone; and Eric Gautier's atypically pop-brite but characteristically shrewd lighting of Wild Grass, a fruitful matching of his sensibilities with Resnais's.