My Award Nominations: Best Cinematography

This was a great year for this category. Many DPs exhibited rich and varied work that was not only visually dazzling, but saturated with thematic subtext. Whittling it down to ten was tough enough, but then choosing five after that was even more painful (Bradford Young, I'm so sorry!).

Here are my Best Cinematography nominees for 2014, each accompanied as usual with a frame that stood out to me as especially memorable:

'Boyhood' wins big with New York Film Critics

Richard Linklater's Boyhood came away with three prizes from the New York Film Critics Circle this afternoon (Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress for Patricia Arquette), launching what I can only hope will be a successful campaign to Oscar glory... in SOME category at least! I still have a hard time seeing this winning the Academy's top honour (appeal may not be broad enough), but its artistic relevance might push it to a win in Screenplay or even Director -- could you imagine a Picture/Director split for a THIRD consecutive year?!? Crazy, but not out of the question. At any rate, I would consider it a triumph to see it collect even one trophy at season's end, and this impressive showing with the New York crowd is a good start.

My Awards nominations: Cinematography

My nominees for Cinematography are:

Drive (Newton Thomas Sigel):

L.A. is sleekly conveyed through Sigel's luminous photography; a mesmerizing display of soft lighting and focus to offset the brutality of the content.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Jeff Cronenweth):

The film may be an empty exercise in style, but such style! The green-saturated coloration fits the murky story nicely. Some experimental shots work well.

Midnight in Paris (Darius Khondji, Johanne Debas):

The midnight sequences are beautifully shot with warm, textured lighting, before jolting us back into Gil's painful present with the hard, bright light of day.

The Tree of Life (Emmanuel Lubezki):

Be it the indelible vastness of an otherworldly shore, or the minute delicacy of a floating butterfly, Lubezki's compositions are lush and hypnotic.

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Seamus McGarvey):

McGarvey captures Eva's adhesive guilt through dozens of arresting (if not subtle) images symbolic of bloodstained hands with deep, cascading reds.

Just missed: The Artist, Bullhead, Hell and Back Again, Hugo, War Horse,
Miss Bala, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Martha Marcy May Marlene

Review - Midnight in Paris

Midnight in Paris opens, as one would expect from a filmmaker as nostalgic as Woody Allen, with a music montage starring the great city itself. And yet what we see is not quite the same city immortalized in art, song, and story from decades past. While landmarks such as Le Champs Elysees or The Eiffel Tower feature prominently, Allen carefully includes in each shot some peripheral reminders of how times have changed the City of Love; a scaffolding here, a chain-link fence there, tourists reading maps, the lights of congested traffic overpowering the old-fashioned streetlamps – all juxtaposed against a 1920s jazz standard on the soundtrack, recalling his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan.