March 29, 2023
With Sicario, a stylishly made high-impact movie about the drug wars on the lawless border area between the U.S. and Mexico, the career star of French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve continues to ascend.
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The movie Steve Jobs, about the mercurial and charismatic founder of Apple Computer, focuses on his personal introduction of three career-defining computers, spanning the period from 1984 to 1998. The dramatic launches before large audiences in three separate venues comprise the three-act structure of the movie, directed by Danny Boyle with a script by Aaron Sorkin. Jobs is portrayed by Michael Fassbender. The challenge for Guy Hendrix Dyas, the film’s […]
Hungarian-born director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, one of Hollywood’s most distinctive cinematographers, died at the age of 85 on Jan. 1 in Los Angeles. He won an Academy Award for best cinematography for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the sci-fi blockbuster directed by Steven Spielberg. He was also nominated another three times for The Deer Hunter, The River and The Black Dahlia. […]
Legendary director of photography Haskell Wexler died Sunday at 93. Wexler was nominated five times for the Oscar for best cinematography, and won twice – for his work on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Bound for Glory. […]
Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, is a shocking but also touching human drama about the tens of thousands of youngsters who are enlisted and coerced into becoming child soldiers in the bloody conflicts that are a fact of life in many African nations.
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Youth is the new film by Italian director-screenwriter Paolo Sorrentino. The movie — a Fox-Searchlight release — features the same captivating and often sumptuous visuals of The Great Beauty which won an Academy Award for best foreign film two years ago. The movie boasts a stellar acting ensemble — Michael Caine, Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano and Jane Fonda. […]
Director of photography Ed Lachman, in shooting Carol, tried hard to make the movie’s imagery have the look, feel and sense of social and cultural uncertainty of the early 1950s period in which the film takes place. He shot on film in Super 16mm and used old-style lenses. He also referenced what he calls “the soft soiled look” of photographers of that era.
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Director of photography Danny Cohen lensed two movies released this year, and they couldn’t be more different in subject matter and in their look. Room is about a mother, Ma, and her 5-year-old son Jack. The two have been kept locked up for years in a 10 x 10 room by Old Nick, their tormentor and Ma’s abductor when she was a teenager. The Danish Girl tells the true story of Einar Wegener, a married man in 1930s’ Denmark, who underwent the world’s first transgender operation and became a woman, Lili Elbe. […]
Showing the un-showable, but not the unwatchable. That was the taut tightrope that Hungarian director László Nemes had to walk to make Son of Saul, a movie that gives more than a glimpse of what it was like to live and die inside the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where the Nazis systematically murdered several million Jews. […]
In Sicario, Canadian director Denis Villeneuve and director of photography Roger Deakins resumed their artistic collaboration which began in 2013 with the dark abduction drama, Prisoners. The movie (sicario means hitman in Mexico) is about the ever more violent and morally-compromised “war on drugs.” It is set on both sides of the lawless U.S.-Mexico border where ruthless drug lords and American law enforcement agents play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. […]