Top 100 World Best Cinematography films.

**

BEST 100

1. The New World - Malick, Lubezki

2. The Thin Red Line - Malick, Toll

3. Days of Heaven - Malick, Almendros

4. Barry Lyndon - Kubrick, Alcott

5. Legends of the Fall - Zwick, Toll

6. Baraka - Fricke

7. Braveheart - Gibson, Toll

8. In the Mood for Love - Wong, Doyle

9. Citizen Kane - Welles, Toland

10. 2046 - Wong, Doyle

11. once upon a time in the west

12. Apocalypse Now!

13. amadeus

14. The Wind and the Lion

15. The Last of the Mohicans

16. Body Heat

17. Cool Hand Luke

18. Blade Runner

19. L.A. Confidential

20. The Last Picture Show

21. Shindler's List

22. The Conformist

23. Ran

24. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

25. Raging Bull

26. Badlands.

27. paris texas

28. chili peppers

29. Psycho

30. Blow

31. Traffic

32. Shawshank Redemption

33. Man on Fire

34. Usual Suspects

35. Seven

36. Dances With Wolves

37. Forest Gump

38. Lawrence of Arabia

39. Touch of Evil

40. The Last Picture Show

41. Yojimbo

42. The Killing Fields

43. Amélie

44. The Twilight Samurai

45. Road to Perdition

46. In the Mood for love

47. Ben-Hur

48. Far and Away

49. O' Brother Where Art Thou?

50. Repulsion

51. Chinatown

52. Oliver Twist

53. l'avventura

54. Red / Beatty

55. 2001: A Space Odyssey / Kubrick

56. Seven Samurai / Kurosawa

57. Titanic

58. Unforgiven

59. Stalker / Tarkovski

60. Vertigo / Hitchcock

61. The Element of Crime - Tom Elling

62. Blood Simple - Barry Sonnenfeld

63. Godfather 1 & 2

64. Empire of the Sun

65. Frida

66. Pan's Labyrinth

67. An Angel at my Table

68. The Man with the Movie Camera

69. Battleship Potempkin

70. Far Away, So Close

71. Before the Rain

72. The Match Factory Girl

73. Time of the Gypsies

74. Spirit of the Beehive

75. The English Patient

76. Memoirs of a Geisha

77. The Piano

78. The Horse Whisperer

79. Amorres Peros

80. Children of Men

81. The good the bad and the ugly

82. Come and see

83. Two men and a wardrobe

84. After Life

85. The red light bandit

86. See you in hell friends

87. The Bride with White Hair"

88. Raise the Red Lantern",

89. "Red Sorghum

90. Andrei Rublev

91. Nazarin"

92. The heart of glass

93. The shop on main street

94. The virgin spring

95. The Passion of Joan of Arc

96. "Rashomon

97. Full Metal Jacket

98. 400 Blows

99. Last Tango

100. Snow Falling on Cedars

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Top Ten Directors of Photography

For many many years I had always felt great cinematography

was the film with the most beautiful lighting and pictures. The

last few years though I have begun to feel that great

cinematography is what style and pictures best tell the story.

An exampleof this for me this year was Children of Men. There

are lots of shots and lighting in it that simply look very poor, but

yet its look, style and feel do an incredible job to help tell the

story and pull you in.

-Finner

Each morning in Africa when the sun comes up, each Lion

knows that if it can't out run the slowest antelope it will end up

starving to death. Each antelope knows that if it can't out run

the fastest Lion it won't see the next morning.

So it doesn't really matter if you are a Lion or a antelope,

because when the sun comes up - you'd better start running!

**

a list that doesn’t include such worthy names as Remi Adefarasin (The House of Mirth), Nelson Yu Lik-

wai (all five of Jia Zhang-ke’s features), Stuart Dryburgh (The Piano), John Toll (The Thin Red Line), Peter

Deming (Mulholland Drive), Peter Suschitzky (Spider), Edward Lachman (Far from Heaven), or Büttner.

Such unthinkable exclusion is telling of the wealth of talent currently working behind the camera on film

sets from Hong Kong to Los Angeles.

10. “Peter Andrews”

Peter Andrews does not exist. It’s a pseudonym employed by Steven Soderbergh, who has lensed every

film he’s helmed from Traffic on (he also edits his own work under the name “Mary Ann Bernard”—who

knows why). This raises an altogether different query than the one I mentioned in the introduction to

this piece. That is, has Soderbergh developed into a better director of photography than of movies in

general? Example A: Solaris’s cool, metallic space veneer and moodily oversaturated flashback

sequences. Example B: Full Frontal. Case closed?

09. Harris Savides

Unlike many of my peers, I’m not a fan of Gus Van Sant’s recent (unambiguously Béla Tarr-aping)

output. However, the best thing, without a doubt, about Van Sant’s Loneliness (or whatever you want to

call it) Trilogy is Savides’s exquisite camerawork. Even if Elephant’s tragic high school kids frequently

resemble over-fetishized runway models, there’s still no question that the man knows how to sustain

some of the world’s smoothest tracking shots. Hell, his perfectly modulated balance of Michael Haneke-

style long shots and revealing close-ups almost redeemed the otherwise useless Last Days.

08. Emmanuel Lubezki

Lubezki is a rare talent, but one you can’t necessarily trust with just any filmmaker. His candy-coated

compositions only added, for example, to the kitsch factor of the recent live-action adaptation of Dr.

Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. Partnered with reputable aesthetes like Tim Burton or Terrence Malick, on

the other hand, he’s top-tier all the way. Burton’s Sleepy Hollow is virtually all surface, but—you decide

about 15 minutes in—that doesn’t matter a bit because it looks so damn good. His masterly use of

natural light as an expressive force is best exemplified by Malick’s The New World, which wouldn’t pack

nearly the same end-of-innocence punch without Lubezki’s expertise. (Bonus points for having shot this

breathtaking scene.)

07. Eric Gautier

He’s worked side-by-side with some of France’s finest contemporary filmmakers—Olivier Assayas,

Arnaud Desplechin, Patrice Chereau. Too easy, you say? Like Kobe winning three NBA championships—

with Shaq. Not so fast: Gautier also shot Walter Salles’s staggeringly vapid Che Guevara biopic, The

Motorcycle Diaries, and if you manage to stay awake throughout (no simple feat, granted), it’s clear that

his landscape work there is as stunning as anything in Esther Kahn or Those Who Love Me Can Take the

Train.

06. Roger Deakins

Coen brothers movies always look different and always look great, from Fargo’s snowbound visuals (the

color white has seldom been put to such effective use—seriously) to the rich, smoky black and white of

the noir homage The Man Who Wasn’t There. For this, a generous portion of the credit should go to

Roger Deakins, who’s shot all of their movies since Barton Fink. But that’s not the end of his case.

Deakins also shot Scorsese’s Kundun, bathing the story of the Dalai Lama in deep, radiant hues of yellow

and red, and Sam Mendes’s Jarhead, where he managed to do for sand what Fargo did for snow.

05. Janusz Kaminski

Kaminski won his first Academy Award for his haunting work on Schindler’s List, a daunting exercise in

matching frenzied action with devastating stillness. Spielberg has smartly stuck with him ever since

(though—fun fact—ex-wife and fellow member of Oscar’s Class of ’93 Holly Hunter didn’t). Kaminski’s

crowning achievement as a cinematographer may be one in the same with Spielberg’s masterpiece: A.I.,

hands-down the most visually sumptuous sci-fi film ever made. The harrowing demolition sequence is

proof of Kaminski’s technically fluent, first-rate craftsmanship. The iconic underwater shot of Haley Joel

Osment’s David and the blue fairy statue solidifies his reputation as a visionary artist in his own right.

04. Dion Beebe

Speaking of fruitful director/DP partnerships, Michael Mann and Dion Beebe are—two films in—the duo

du jour in American cinema. Collateral, with its luminous fluorescent glow and striking DV urgency,

captures L.A. as indelibly (and perhaps definitively) as Gordon Willis did New York in Woody Allen’s

Manhattan. Miami Vice is the hypnotically stylish apotheosis of Mann’s designer oeuvre, and he would

never have achieved it without Beebe’s singular lens. Who knows? There might be actual substance in

there somewhere, but that sure as heck ain’t the reason it gets my vote as the best Hollywood movie so

far this year.

03. Mark Li Ping-bing

Whether credited as Mark Li Ping-bing, Mark Lee Ping-bin, Mark Ping-bin Lee, Mark Lee, or Pingbin Li,

this is definitely a guy you want shooting your movie. Hou Hsiao-hsien swears by him, and for good

reason. The trio of vignettes in Three Times might have played as mere back-catalogue rehashes without

Ping-bing’s camera guiding Hou’s signature concerns in fascinating new directions. Where the turn-of-

the-century brothel in 1998’s Flowers of Shanghai is adorned in bold shades of orange, yellow, and gold,

the “Time for Freedom” chapter of Three Times (again set in a turn-of-the-century brothel) is defined by

compositions in blue, green, and violet, beautifully underscoring the painful longing of Hou’s characters.

Aside from Hou, Ping-bing has also lent his painterly touch to Tran An Hung’s The Vertical Ray of the Run

and Tian Zhuangzhuang’s Springtime in a Small Town.

02. Agnes Godard

The first thing everyone notices about Claire Denis films is that tactile sensuality, surfaces that shine in

the sun (the toned soldiers of Beau Travail) or seem to gradually deepen in color before your eyes (the

seemingly mundane hotel room in Friday Night). Ladies and gentleman: Agnes Godard, the DP who can

make anyone or anything look like a Vermeer painting. Her meticulous, penetrating visual style couldn’t

be more perfectly suited to Denis’s strangely shaped, deliberately paced narratives. Trouble Every Day

would be just another Euro-art-horror flick without the weight of melancholy that Godard’s camera

carries. As is, it feels, at times, like a portrait of two suffering saints—who just happen to think

cannibalism’s pretty sexy.

01. Christopher Doyle

To be perfectly honest with you, my choice for #1 here wasn’t terribly difficult. It was basically just a

matter of deduction. Who, over the past decade-plus, has made the most consistently gorgeous-looking

movies? Wong Kar-wai, right? No question. Well, as mentioned above, Wong and Doyle are inseparable

to the point that it’s reasonable to wonder where one ends and the other begins. And no, as virtues go,

breathtaking, eye-popping beauty isn’t everything, but it goes an awfully long way. Think back

momentarily, and consider all the indelible moments that Wong and Doyle have brought us: the would-

be lovers riding off on the motorbike at the close of Fallen Angels, Doyle’s camera peering skyward

before the credits roll; the rhythmic series of impossibly graceful shots following Tony Leung and Maggie

Cheung through their solo motions in In the Mood for Love (shot with Ping-bing); Faye Wong’s android

drifting disaffectedly through Mr. Chow’s pulp fantasy in 2046; the three minutes and forty-two seconds

of romantic ecstasy that is their music video for DJ Shadow’s “Six Days.”

Hey, if that’s not enough for you, Doyle has also shot non-Wong films as diverse as Pen-ek

Ratanaruang’s Last Life in the Universe, Zhang Yimou’s Hero, and Phillip Noyce’s Rabbit-Proof Fence.

Dumplings, Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s contribution to the pan-Asian triptych Three…Extremes,

would be a scathing polemic on its own. With Doyle manning the camera, it’s a striking, self-reflexive

paradox—a visually seductive critique of our image-obsessed (global) culture.

EVER BEST TEN CINEMATOGRAPHERS

1) Sven Nykvist

2) Vittorio Storaro

3) Roger Deakins

4) Nestor Almendros

5) Vilmos Zsigmond

6) Gordon Willis

7) Ed Lachman

8) Carlo Di Palma

9) Janusz Kaminski

10) John Toll