15 More Movies with Great Cinematography

​A little over a year ago, I did a blog post about 15 Movies with Great Cinematography, and since there are so many movies with great cinematography, I thought I should do more of these movies justice by continuing from the previous post. So here are fifteen more movies that I believe best present the art of cinematography:

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15. Juno 2007

Director of Photography: Eric Steelberg​

Movies in the teen genre were already huge in the 2000s, and Juno managed to elevate the subgenre into discussing a taboo topic in complete seriousness: teen pregnancy. Few filmmakers would dare to take on such a task, but director Jason Reitman cracked the code on how to do it by giving the film a kick of spunk in its cinematography. The light and color scheme shifts as the seasons progress, starting warm and vivid and ending colder and bleaker as Juno’s pregnancy progresses—while smooth dolly and pan shots gradually trade themselves in for more static shots. Because Juno proved that an entertaining comedy for teens can also spark difficult conversations, now more films aimed toward youth are willing to attempt something similar.

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14. Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022

Director of Photography: Larkin Seiple (Weapons)

​Few films have turned a trendy premise into a smorgasbord of revolutionary filmmaking the way Everything Everywhere All at Once did with the multiverse. Each universe gets its own visual identity—one styled like a Netflix comedy, another like a National Geographic documentary, one built mostly of black and green hues, and another is entirely white without any shadows. Meanwhile, the universe where the story begins uses colors and lights that clash against each other, mirroring the main character's scattered, unfocused state of existence. Yet what really holds the narratives together is the fight choreography, particularly the rapid jump cuts across universes mid-fight. Ambitious cinematography tricks such as this prove how well the directing duo fused cinematography with special effects and editing to achieve their singular vision.

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13. Bugonia 2025

Director of Photography: Robbie Ryan (The Favourite, Marriage Story)

Yorgos Lanthimos brings his usual toolkit to Bugonia: low angles, fisheye lenses, tracking shots, high-saturation and high-contrast color, but along with that shoots the whole film in VistaVision, a format built for crisp, clear images. Capturing that clarity wasn’t made any easier by the longer-than-average camera lenses that Lanthimos opted to use for a more narrow, intimate framing of the many interactions between the three main characters. Most of the film unfolds in a basement, and it’s lit chiefly by LEDs, fluorescent tubes, and tungsten bulbs, which only made the VistaVision photography an even greater challenge. The result is a powerful social commentary about class and gender power dynamics which plays more like a midnight movie, which helps this little movie surpass the impact of most simpler character dramas.

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12. Moonlight ​2016

​Director of Photography: James Laxton

In the last decade, Moonlight has already influenced how camera and lighting crews film Black skin, using different methods of showcasing its full range of beauty. Just like sunny Miami, the all-Black cast gives off a radiant spectrum of colors as if both the sun and moon are shining on them at once. Pastel daytime tones and bleak nighttime blues create what co-writer Tarell McCraney called a “beautiful nightmare,” an effect built partially by shooting each of the film's three chapters, following Chiron across his life, on a different film stock. That level of control gave Black audiences a kind of on-screen representation they'd rarely been offered before, and since then have seen more great films where they are front-and-center, like Get Out, Us, Nope, and Sinners.

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11. The Substance ​2024

Director of Photography: Benjamin Kracun (Promising Young Woman)

​Hollywood's toxic beauty standards get a body-horror treatment in The Substance, a film that's already proven within its first year how far nonverbal storytelling can carry a complex idea. Director Coralie Fagret drew her inspiration heavily from the colorfully dark compositions of Stanley Kubrick while simultaneously echoing German expressionism in their surreal design, resulting in something that comes off more like a psychological arthouse drama than a grossout body horror. Even the camera and lens choices, particularly the dreamy bokeh effect created by the macro lenses, were tuned to keep the actresses' skin looking pristine. Surrealism, body horror, and the beauty of a woman’s body naturally shouldn’t work together, but Fagreat pulls it off to in turn criticize the sexualization of women and shaming them as they age. 

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10. Get Out 2017

Director of Photography: Toby Oliver

Get Out built its dread without leaning into expected horror tropes, rather leaning more on similar techniques Moonlight used to light Black skin properly. Cyan and green gels give the house in the woods an unsettling texture, while warm, bright lights create a false feeling of security at exactly the wrong times. Distance is another often used technique, such as by using zoom lenses and uncomfortably tight close-ups to dig deep into someone’s fears, or by using wide shots as exposition for important details that provide an objective perspective of the conflict within a scene. Over the previous decade, the unnerving cinematography enabled Get Out to essentially start a renaissance in modern horror with artfully made successes like A Quiet Place, Us, Nope, The Substance, Obsession, and Backrooms.

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9. Anora 2024

​Director of Photography: Drew Daniels

​Shot in only thirty-seven days with a documentary-size production crew, Anora merges screwball comedies with gangster movies and fairy tales to create something never seen before. Despite the small production size, the director of photography’s toolkit included anamorphic lenses and other lenses that were probably 40-50 years old, along with a need to rely mostly on a few LED light setups. One of the bigger production challenges involved filming through windows and across the street while the actors interacted with random people on the street who couldn’t know they were in a film shoot. Despite their constraints, the production crew miraculously broke traditional Hollywood convention to generate a story with mass appeal and a cinematography style that embraces more what’s practical rather than what’s beautiful.

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8. Inglourious Basterds ​2009

Director of Photography: Robert Richardson (Django Unchained, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood)

Quentin Tarantino satirizes the Nazis with class and drama in Inglourious Basterds, and Robert Richardson's camerawork does a lot of the heavy lifting in widening the film's view of WWII-era Germany. The opening scene kicks off the film’s clear compositional nods to spaghetti westerns, especially The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, with lighting choices that are more concerned with building tension than making practical sense within the story's world. Yet Tarantino’s greatest trick to giving this period drama a contemporary vibe is by framing actors in the dead-center, confrontationally commanding all the audience’s attention. Most viewers never consciously register these choices, which is exactly why they work in bringing the era to life more vividly than done in most WWII films.

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7. There Will be Blood ​2007

Director of Photography: Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights, King Richard)

Inspired by old Hollywood Westerns such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, There Will Be Blood manages both its scope and intimacy in ways that helped inspire future filmmakers to tell stories with a similar degree of restrained scope. The harsh desert location forced that restraint on the crew as they struggled to get good exposures in daylight, magic hour, and at night—all shot on film instead of digital. The oil rig sets brought their own set of dangers, especially when the derrick had to be burnt down, which they only had one night to capture. Without Paul Thomas Anderson's persistence in this challenging production, later blockbusters with a desert setting like Mad Max: Fury Road and the Dune movies might never have gotten the green light.

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6. Amadeus ​1984

​Director of Photography: Miroslav Ondříček 

​Amadeus set a new bar for how fluidly musical theater could translate to film, starting with the panoramic 2.35:1 aspect ratio that keeps Mozart’s operas fully in frame whenever they’re on screen. Shots of him conducting his orchestra are pointed up at him, giving the impression that he’s in power over his creation, and thus, has power over the higher social elites in the theater seats behind him. The candlelight photography that further elevates this film’s depiction of Vienna often is arranged so only one side of a certain actor’s face is lit, giving them a subtle look of madness. No film musical before it had managed to stage something this theatrical, and Amadeus still maintains its live-opera magic decades later.

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5. Dunkirk ​2017

Director of Photography: Hoyte van Hoytema (Nope, Oppenheimer)

​Dunkirk showcases the best components of other classic war movies (like Platoon and Saving Private Ryan) in a nonlinear narrative that allows action and spectacle, not dialogue, to set the scene. Director Christopher Nolan considered this to be “probably the highest-resolution Hollywood movie ever put on screen,” with its natural lighting, very few CGI shots, and over 70 percent of it shot on IMAX film. The dogfight sequences alone required cameras positioned in every possible way: watching from a distance, flying straight into the action, mounted in the cockpit, bolted to a plane's exterior, to name a few. That kind of hands-on filmmaking by such a respected visionary director helped pave the way for future blockbusters like Barbie and the Dune movies to film at such a similarly massive scale.

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4. Inception ​2010

Director of Photography: Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight)

​Inception adapted the filming and storytelling styles of past sci-fi/action movies with a mixture of practical effects and gorgeous cinematography to start a renaissance of blockbuster films that turn the IMAX format into an artistic storytelling tool. The famous rotating-hallway sequence required two cameras working in tandem: one rig mounted to the set itself so it could track the actors as the whole room spun, and a second on a crane which moved independently from the set. 2001: A Space Odyssey attempted something similar decades earlier, but Stanley Kubrick also never used light and color to keep several simultaneous dream worlds distinct for the audience, as Christopher Nolan did. Under the hands of any other director, Inception wouldn’t have been at all spellbinding to watch.

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3. The Revenant ​2015

Director of Photography: Emmanuel Lubezki (Birdman, Gravity)

​The Revenant was an important filmmaking endeavor that helped make major blockbusters rely less on CGI to save money on their expensive productions, consequently bringing about more immersive cinematography. Director Alejandro Iñárritu chose to film his Birdman follow-up in the Canadian wilderness, knowing that it would require a maddening amount of choreography to catch natural light in every single shot. Though shooting digitally didn't stop the crew from achieving a crisp, cool, heavily saturated look, especially in the film's many panoramic landscape shots, which are allowed to simply linger with minimal cutting. What came out of that effort was a grittier vision of the American frontier than Hollywood had attempted before, one that still works as the ultimate showcase for nature on the grand big screen.

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2. The Matrix ​1999

Director of Photography: Bill Pope (Clueless)

​Bullet-time photography. Camera movements that swing around hand-to-hand combat. Color schemes that signal shifts in space and time. The Matrix made all these cinematic bells and whistles commonplace across genres far beyond sci-fi. The Wachowskis shaped this film by the comic books and anime they grew up on, while folding in some martial-arts influence and a grimy green filter that became the Matrix reality's signature look. Comic book artists drew the storyboards to keep that same energy in every frame, with black composed deliberately into each shot so shadow rather than light or color guides the eye. It's hard now to find an action or sci-fi film, or really any film built around visual effects, that doesn't owe something to what The Matrix revolutionized.

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1. Forrest Gump ​1994

Director of Photography: Don Burgess (Cast Away)

​Digital effects in movies wouldn’t be what they are today without the ingenuity of Robert Zemeckis’ team as they harnessed the power of cinematography to make Forrest Gump. The sequence of Forrest running across the United States is a gorgeous showcase of the nation’s landscapes, encapsulating the movie’s entire theme of how beautiful America is through the eyes of someone like Forrest. Likewise, filming Tom Hanks for the decades-old archive footage scenes that include Forrest had to match exactly the quality of the clips’ lighting, color, and grain, which demonstrates how integral great cinematography is for such ambitious groundbreaking use of CGI. These moments from Forrest Gump demonstrate the key to truly influential cinematography: When a production crew’s creative solutions around their challenges eventually push the whole industry forward.

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Trevor Pacelli is a young adult on the autism spectrum as well as the author of What Movies Can Teach Us About Disabilities, What Movies Can Teach Us About Bullying, Summer of the Fruit Virus and the illustrator of The Kindergarten Adventures of Amazing Grace: What in the World is Autism?, Gardenland: The Peas' and Carrots' Party Shake-Up, Tipper Takes the Mound, and the author/illustrator of Amazing Grace Goes to the Zoo.