I typically have two problems with found footage horror movies. First, it’s often hard to believe the characters wouldn’t simply drop their cameras once the body count begins. Just as the hau...
In the first season of Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the titular teenaged demigod and his compatriots travel across the country, with stops from St. Louis to Las Vegas, on a missio...
25 years ago, Pi—a $70,000 indie about an obsessive mathematician shot on 16mm black and white reversal stock—put cinematographer Matthew Libatique on the map. In the intervening quarter cent...
The diversity of cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister’s output makes it difficult to typecast him. The German DP won an Emmy for his work on a BBC version of Great Expectations and followed with...
Music videos have been good to Cristina Dunlap. As a photography-obsessed high schooler, a chance meeting landed the L.A. native a gig shooting stills on a music video. It happened to be for Deat...
The Killer begins with an assassin (Michael Fassbender) in a half-completed WeWork office awaiting the arrival of his latest target. As he waits, he details his vocational mantras for the audienc...
In The Holdovers, a professor, a student and a grief-stricken cook are stranded together at a New England boarding school over the holidays. The story takes place in the early 1970s, an era whose...
Brandon K. McLaughlin remembers the exact moment he knew he wanted to work in the movie business. It was Halloween night and McLaughlin was eight years old. His uncle—a special effects technici...
Eigil Bryld must be feeling funny lately. After a career peppered with reality-based dramas (You Don’t Know Jack and The Report), thrillers (Deep Water) and romantic period pieces (Tulip Fever ...
On big budget spectacles, the tail of VFX often wags the dog of principal photography. With The Creator—an $80 million sci-fi epic about a war between mankind and humanoid AI starring John Davi...
In December of 1964, principal photography finished on the pilot of Star Trek, featuring captain Christopher Pike (played by The Searchers’ Jeffrey Hunter) as the commander of the Enterprise. W...
When you make your living in production, the relationship between work and time off can be a complicated one. After months of Fraturdays and Second Meal pizza at 2 a.m., you need to rest, decompr...
With only 24 days to capture nearly 30 sketches, the average I Think You Should Leave bit is shot in roughly six to eight hours. That might be for the best. When you’re slopping up steaks or sh...
In the new Netflix series Beef, a struggling contractor (Steven Yeun) and an affluent entrepreneur (Ali Wong) become embroiled in an escalating feud following a road rage incident. The series f...
Cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes says that shooting an actor playing twins is like learning a new filmmaking language. By now, he’s fluent. Lipes lensed all six episodes of the 2020 HBO miniserie...
With Antiviral, Possessor and Infinity Pool, filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg has expeditiously carved out a distinct, experimental aesthetic for his work. However, he has followed in the footsteps o...
Though it hasn’t reached the fever pitch of absurdity of The Fast and the Furious franchise just yet—a series that began as a Point Break riff but now includes nuclear submarines and Pontiac ...
In the new Amazon series Swarm, a fanatical devotee of a Beyoncé-esque pop star embarks on a quest to meet the singer, with a few stops along the way to dispose of those who have disparaged her ...
In 1989, Friday the 13th transplanted its hockey-masked slasher from summer camp to concrete jungle for the franchise’s eighth installment, Jason Takes Manhattan. That titular promise was not f...
According to cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister, writer/director Todd Field often expressed his desired aesthetic for TÁR in a series of repeated Field-isms: Let’s just witness. Don’t gild...